This is a post about dy­nam­ics in the Berkeley ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity, al­though it may be rele­vant to broader do­mains.

It is highly opinionated about what I think is im­por­tant.

I tried to op­ti­mize this for a clear-cut goal, then re­al­ized the clear-cut goal was “I want to make it eas­ier for peo­ple to co­op­er­ate with me on com­mu­nity-build­ing, and I just want to do a mas­sive brain­dump to get them up to speed on where I’m com­ing from, so that when I have a con­ver­sa­tion about it we can skip to the harder parts.”

If you are se­ri­ous about ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity-build­ing, read this, and then come talk to me af­ter­wards.

When I vis­ited the Bay in 2015, a friend (who used to live in NYC) re­marked “you know, when I was in New York, I felt like once a week I went to ‘ra­tio­nal­ity club’. In Berkeley it feels more like I live in a small ra­tio­nal­ity village — there’s a cou­ple hun­dred peo­ple, I’m friends with some of them. We bump into each other in the street on the way to the gro­cery store.”

Even­tu­ally I moved here, and yup. That is how it is. Sorta. With im­por­tant caveats and prob­lems.

There are lots of lit­tle sub­cul­tures in the Ra­tion­al­ist Bay, some over­lap­ping. But I think there are two pri­mary rea­sons peo­ple come:

to have a Village – a home, among like-minded people

to con­tribute to the Mis­sion – en­sur­ing the flour­ish­ing of hu­man val­ues (or some­thing like them)

In the past 10 years, the Mis­sion has ac­quired se­ri­ous in­fras­truc­ture. There’s been much less in­ten­tional effort to build a home. Mostly for good rea­son – the Mis­sion is im­por­tant, and hard. Com­pe­tent Peo­ple are Rare and the World is Big. Build­ing a village is also hard, and if you’re able to do so, you’re prob­a­bly also able to work on big­ger pic­ture Mis­sion stuff.

The Mis­sion pro­vides ju­u­u­ust enough value as a “home” to satis­fice the peo­ple in­volved (which might not ac­tu­ally be suffi­cient for them, just de­cent enough that it’s not their pri­mary bot­tle­neck).

In the past cou­ple years, we’ve be­gun to see more se­ri­ous efforts to­wards build­ing Village in­fras­truc­ture. But I think these efforts are of­ten miss­ing im­por­tant as­pects of the big pic­ture.

Summary

The Mis­sion and the Village need differ­ent things.

The Mis­sion ul­ti­mately needs to be out­ward fac­ing. It’s about putting a dent in the uni­verse.

The Village needs to pri­ori­tize peo­ple’s own needs.

I think these re­quire differ­ent mind­sets. and are eas­ier op­ti­mize sep­a­rately.

It’s im­por­tant that the Village ex­ist, on its own terms.

It so hap­pens that the Mis­sion needs to provide its mem­bers a home. One might build an ex­plic­itly Mis­sion-cen­tered-village. I think this is ac­tu­ally a good idea.

But I think it’s still valuable to have an ac­tual Village, that doesn’t need to jus­tify ev­ery­thing in terms of The Big Pic­ture, uni­ver­sal flour­ish­ing, deeply un­der­stand­ing the world, or x-risk. If this is the only lens through which you build a home, your home will be im­pov­er­ished.

It is im­por­tant to have peo­ple and spaces that are op­ti­miz­ing for the village for its own sake, not as a sub­tle re­cruit­ment-for-the-mis­sion strat­egy.

This isless im­por­tantthan the Mis­sion (ac­cord­ing to me). But still in­cred­ibly im­por­tant.One cru­cial point of the Mis­sion is that peo­ple have ac­cess to good villages. Atomic in­di­vi­d­u­al­ism has crip­pled our ca­pac­ity for good villages. It is rare and pre­cious that we ac­tu­ally have a shot at build­ing one.

But. The rea­son this Village is spe­cial is that it is en­tan­gled with the Mis­sion, in a sym­biotic way.

If you are work­ing on the Village, you ac­tu­ally need to un­der­stand the Mis­sion. For two rea­sons:

On the Village’s own terms, it de­pends heav­ily on the Mis­sion’s en­ergy, drive, mythol­ogy, and cul­ture. Re­move that, and I don’t think the Village ac­tu­ally works.

Mean­while, sep­a­rately, the Village needs re­sources. It will have ac­cess to much more re­sources if it is Mis­sion al­igned. And I think there is room to be Mis­sion-al­igned while suc­ceed­ing on the Village’s terms

The Village is not the Mis­sion, and is not out­ward fac­ing. But the Village should help you pre­pare for the Mis­sion, if you want.

The Village still needs fences and stan­dards.

There are lots of ways you can build a village, that don’t de­pend on any par­tic­u­lar mis­sion. But, no mat­ter how you or­ga­nize your village, it is go­ing to need some kind of stan­dard, some kind of costly sig­nal­ing that works as a co­or­di­na­tion mechanism.

Peo­ple who end up drawn to the Village in­stead of the Mis­sion tend to have an egal­i­tar­ian in­stinct, and a de­sire to wel­come ev­ery­one. I don’t think this works. The Village needs to be more re­laxed than the Mis­sion. But it can­not take care of ev­ery­body, and will over­whelm it­self if it tries.

The Ra­tion­al­ity Com­mu­nity, and the Village and Mis­sion that I’m most ex­cited by, are the ones at the cen­ter of this Venn Di­a­gram:

I think truth, im­pact and be­ing hu­man can in­ter­sect in a way that is ex­cit­ing, fulfilling, and im­por­tant. I’m not sure I can jus­tify this claim. But I know that the cen­ter-of-that-di­a­gram is the com­mu­nity I’m most ex­cited to build to­wards, and most ex­cited to col­lab­o­rate with peo­ple on.

If you’re se­ri­ous, come talk to me.

If you are ex­cited by this and want to put in se­ri­ous effort into build­ing a Village (ei­ther on the Village’s terms, or the Mis­sion’s), I’ll make a good-faith effort to talk to you for at least an hour.

The rest of this post is my back­ground mod­els of how all of this fits to­gether. My ac­tual mod­els are dense and nu­anced and situ­a­tion-spe­cific. I think it’s im­por­tant that peo­ple work on this, but there are a lot of ways to go sub­tly wrong.

If you’re in­ter­ested in helping se­ri­ously, af­ter read­ing this post and iron­ing out any ba­sic con­fu­sions in the com­ments, come chat with me.

Is­sues with a Sin­gle Sta­tus Ladder

The Village and the Mis­sion have their own virtues, and patholo­gies. They share at least one meta-pathol­ogy: the sta­tus hi­er­ar­chies are illeg­ible, and there are no fences any­where to de­mar­cate who is wel­come where. When you ar­rive, in­stead of a fence, you’ll find a swamp. You’ll see some flick­er­ing campfires in the dis­tance, but some of those campfires are mis­lead­ing swamp gas.

The most ob­vi­ous as­sump­tion is that there is a sin­gle sta­tus-lad­der that goes all the way from “rando who just showed up who doesn’t have any friends or skills” to “peo­ple who in­ter­face reg­u­larly with billion­aires while mak­ing de­ci­sions that will hope­fully im­pact the fu­ture light-cone.”

So…

This can feel (and be) quite bad. In the same way that mod­ern poor peo­ple are ob­jec­tively wealthier than an­cient kings, but when they com­pare them­selves to mod­ern celebri­ties they still feel a keen lack of re­sources… a per­son who would or­di­nar­ily feel so­cially se­cure in­stead feels a pres­sure to keep-up-with-the-Jone­ses (and the Jone­ses know Dustin Moskovitz)

Even if you don’t want to climb the sta­tus lad­der, many of the peo­ple around you do. There is pres­sure up­wards. Every­one is busy. Every­one has op­tions. This makes it harder to build ac­tu­ally good friend­ships – Good friend­ships re­quire space to just… chill. And to trust that you can con­tinue to just chill when you need to.

Many of the peo­ple who would be most com­pe­tent at run­ning the village quickly end up in­volved with Mis­sion-cen­tric orgs.

A lot of this isn’t fix­able. The state of the world isn’t okay, and it needs Mis­sion ori­ented peo­ple who are will­ing to ded­i­cate their lives to it. Com­pe­tent Peo­ple Are Rare and the World Is Big. If you are ca­pa­ble of con­tribut­ing to the Mis­sion, I think that’s good. It’s re­gret­table if this means that you will not spend as much (or any) time im­prov­ing the Village. But it would be even more re­gret­table if you didn’t help tilt the arc of hu­man his­tory to­wards good­ness in a scal­able fash­ion.

But, I think there are some lo­cal im­prove­ments to be made. I think most Mis­sion-al­igned peo­ple should be at least “pay­ing taxes” to help main­tain the Village. I think there are skills peo­ple can gain which let them con­tribute to the Village on the mar­gin. And un­der­stand­ing the situ­a­tion might help oth­ers find ad­di­tional im­prove­ments I haven’t thought of.

The sim­plest change is a shift to­wards ac­knowl­edg­ing at least two sta­tus lad­ders, and it must be pos­si­ble to be high sta­tus within the Village, on the Village’s terms.

What is the Mis­sion?

The Mis­sion is to make sure ev­ery­one can flour­ish.

The Mis­sion has many sub­com­po­nents. It in­cludes un­der­stand­ing the world. It in­cludes be­ing able to co­or­di­nate effec­tively with peo­ple who are already helping. It in­cludes helping di­rectly.

It in­cludes helping peo­ple who are suffer­ing.

It in­cludes helping peo­ple who are not suffer­ing, but the differ­ence be­tween who they are and who they could be is vast.

It in­cludes fix­ing sys­tems that are sys­tem­at­i­cally bro­ken.

It in­cludes un­der­stand­ing things deeply for its own sake.

It in­cludes figur­ing out how to think about peo­ple that don’t ex­ist yet.

Many el­e­ments of the Mis­sion in­ter­play with one way an­other, in ways that are hard to pre­dict in ad­vance. Other el­e­ments aren’t re­lated at all, but are nonethe­less united in the fact that they steer the fu­ture to­wards some­thing good.

The Mis­sion is not morally obli­ga­tory, but is morally com­mend­able.

The pur­pose of hav­ing morals in the first place is to help you make good de­ci­sions and co­or­di­nate. Some peo­ple naively de­com­part­men­tal­ize their moral be­liefs and end up de­pressed and bro­ken. A moral sys­tem that re­li­ably does that is a stupid moral sys­tem and you should pick a differ­ent one.

Even if all you ever do is give 1% of post-ne­ces­si­ties in­come, that’s fine by me. And even if you don’t do any of this and just fo­cus on flour­ish­ing, your­self, that’s fine by me too – your flour­ish­ing is part of of the pro­ject of Hu­man Flour­ish­ing.

And if you do donate 10%, as far as I’m con­cerned you’ve joined the ranks of the Mis­sion. If you start to stress about whether you’re “do­ing enough”, yes, you are do­ing enough.

There are harder things you can do, many of which in­volve risk. I can’t promise that they’ll work, or that you’ll come out okay. I can’t ex­plain what those things are be­cause I don’t know. One of the biggest el­e­ments of The Mis­sion is figur­ing out what The Mis­sion is.

The Mis­sion is Net­work Con­strained, and many of the best things you can do is move into a so­cial situ­a­tion where you au­to­mat­i­cally make con­nec­tions that will help you learn, think and grow. Figure out what to do. Do it.

You are not obli­gated to un­der­take the hard­est as­pects of the Mis­sion. You should not do things that aren’t sus­tain­able for you.

But it would be dishon­est to pre­tend the Mis­sion doesn’t need all the help it can get.

The Mis­sion re­quires stan­dards.

The Mis­sion re­quires be­ing able to say “Sorry, you are not yet good enough to do this job.”

The Mis­sion re­quires be­ing able to say, some­times “Hey, when we first started this pro­ject, we were small and scrappy and had to make do. We are now at a point where we need to raise our stan­dards, and you will have to raise yours as well if you want to con­tinue on this pro­ject.”

The Mis­sion re­quires some­times say­ing “Your pro­ject has turned out to be net-nega­tive, and is gum­ming up the works pre­vent­ing other pro­jects from suc­ceed­ing, and you ei­ther need to rad­i­cally change, or gain skills, or stop.”

The Mis­sion in­volves ask­ing hard ques­tions, over and over, and hav­ing the an­swers of­ten be un­com­fortable, painful, or hor­rify­ing.

The Mis­sion can­not offer psy­cholog­i­cal safety.

This is quite bad for the ex­e­cu­tion of the Mis­sion, since psy­cholog­i­cal safety is kind of im­por­tant to ac­tu­ally get stuff done.

Also, the whole point of the Mis­sion is for flour­ish­ing. At the very least, if the Mis­sion de­stroys your abil­ity to flour­ish, that’s sad.

What is the Village?

The Village is for mak­ing sure that we can flour­ish.

We’re all at differ­ent points in our lives, and need differ­ent things. The Village must ac­count for that.

The Village is not the Mis­sion. The Village must suc­ceed on it’s own terms – tak­ing care of its peo­ple. But one of the rea­sons this village is spe­cial is that it helps you pre­pare for the Mis­sion if you want to.

(Another thing that makes this village spe­cial is that it’s build on as­pira­tions of truth­seek­ing. I’m not sure if all villages need to ori­ent around truth, but I know that this one does.)

What is a good village?

A good village takes care of its mem­bers, and helps them meet their so­cial needs.

A good village pro­vides peo­ple with op­por­tu­ni­ties to bump into each other spo­rad­i­cally, in low-stakes set­tings, so that peo­ple can even­tu­ally de­velop deep friend­ships.

A good village helps peo­ple to raise chil­dren.

A good village pro­vides av­enues for peo­ple to grow – ideally it pro­vides mul­ti­ple are­nas in which peo­ple can de­velop emo­tional skills, phys­i­cal skills, mar­ketable skills, in­tel­lec­tual skills.

A good village has es­ca­lat­ing asks and re­wards. Par­ti­ci­pat­ing in village life in­volves at least some effort to pitch in oc­ca­sion­ally and fol­low norms. You will get more out of village life the more you put into it (and villages are healthiest and strongest if, over time, they ask more of their mem­bers).

A good village needs the slack to oc­ca­sion­ally res­cue villagers who are in bad situ­a­tions.

An ideal village feels like home, and feels safe.

(Yes, this is some­what in ten­sion with the Village ask­ing things of you. I think the solu­tion is for the baseline asks to be some­thing that a per­son can meet, even if they are sick or de­pressed for an ex­tended pe­riod of time, but for putting in more effort to or­gan­i­cally re­sult in higher pay­off).

A good village has fences, of some sort. Be­cause the Village has the obli­ga­tion to take care of its mem­bers, and be­cause re­sources are limited… it nec­es­sar­ily fol­lows that the Village can­not take care of ev­ery­body. Some villages have ex­plicit bar­ri­ers to en­try. Others have vague so­cial net­works to nav­i­gate to get in.

If you have no fences, you most likely don’t have a very good village.

A village is not (just) a community

A village ac­com­plishes all of this at a scale that a “small com­mu­nity” does not. A village is a level of or­ga­ni­za­tion above com­mu­nity, which fa­cil­i­tates the cre­ate of small com­mu­ni­ties. A small com­mu­nity is in turn a larger or­ga­niz­ing unit than “group of friends.” Each level of scale pro­vides differ­ent things.

A small com­mu­nity aims at many of the same goals listed above. A village helps gen­er­ate com­mu­ni­ties that pre­cisely match your needs. And a village grants ac­cess to a cer­tain qualia that is some­what differ­ent from a com­mu­nity, (which is turn a differ­ent qualia from “a group of friends.”)

Alas, I can’t re­ally ex­plain that qualia. If you don’t have an in­tu­itive sense of why it mat­ters, I am not ar­gu­ing that you should care. I can say, it’s some­thing like “be­ing a part of some­thing big­ger than your­self” and some­thing like “feel­ing like there’s some­thing pow­er­ful that has your back.”

The cur­rent Berkeley com­mu­nity of­ten does not have peo­ple’s back, but it as­pires to.

Who is “we”?

Good ques­tion. I have an opinionated an­swer for the Berkeley com­mu­nity in par­tic­u­lar:

The Village is the peo­ple who or­gan­i­cally came to live around a par­tic­u­lar sub­set of the Mis­sion – the part that no­ticed “Hmm, hu­man­ity is hurtling to­wards ex­is­ten­tial risk, and no­body is do­ing any­thing about AI, and peo­ple seem re­mark­ably bad a think­ing about all this,” and then be­gan clus­ter­ing in Berkeley to make progress on that.

Now, since then, that or­ganic growth has led to a wide va­ri­ety of peo­ple, some of whom aren’t here for the Mis­sion – they’re here be­cause they have friends here, or they like ra­tio­nally minded peo­ple but don’t make a big deal about it.

There are peo­ple who care about the Mis­sion, but not x-risk speci­fi­cally.

There are peo­ple who care, but nonethe­less find them­selves more drawn to village life than a mis­sion cam­paign. This is not only okay but good – if no one wanted to make the village their pri­mary fo­cus, the Village would not have the strength to suc­ceed (ei­ther on it’s own terms or the Mis­sion’s terms).

But it’s im­por­tant to rec­og­nize that this Village de­rives much of its en­ergy from the Mis­sion ker­nel that it formed around. That ker­nel was oddly spe­cific, and it makes the village oddly spe­cific.

Helping the Village to thrive re­quires un­der­stand­ing that.

Why must the Village re­late to the Mis­sion at all?

In the Old Days, villages were united by shared ge­og­ra­phy, fam­ily, his­tory, and eco­nomic ac­tivity. But those things no longer bind to­gether a village au­to­mat­i­cally. And the village needs some­thing around which to co­here.

I have seen mul­ti­ple villages, in par­tic­u­lar cre­ated by the post-athe­ist-crowd, which failed.

They failed be­cause, in an in­creas­ingly at­om­ized world, they didn’t offer any­thing that was spe­cial. They didn’t filter for any par­tic­u­lar sub­set of peo­ple, so the peo­ple didn’t es­pe­cially get along. They didn’t have a shared mythol­ogy that in­spired peo­ple to­wards the same as­pira­tions. They didn’t even have par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing ac­tivi­ties ev­ery­one liked.

Peo­ple couldn’t grow up to­gether, so they grew apart.

It is not a co­in­ci­dence that the Berkeley com­mu­nity is an hon­est to good­ness village, whereas most so­cial clubs are just vague net­works that are barely any differ­ent from the alienat­ing, at­om­ized so­ciety around them.

The Berkeley village has a shared mythol­ogy, and a (rea­son­ably) shared ethos. It has a clearer and more com­pel­ling vi­sion of how to fit into the uni­verse than any of the groups of athe­ists I met who awk­wardly said to them­selves “well, there’s no rea­son we can’t have a church, let’s make one”, but then didn’t know the first thing about how to make a church, and didn’t agree on enough prin­ci­ples to bind them­selves to­gether.

(For what it’s worth, the other villages I’m most ex­cited by are the Filk com­mu­nity, the Con­nec­tion/​Authen­tic-Re­lat­ing com­mu­nity, and some dance or other ac­tivity-based com­mu­ni­ties)

Can’t the Village at least move some­where af­ford­able?

Alas. No.

A small com­mu­nity could leave Berkeley to­gether. And if they just want each other’s friend­ship, and nei­ther care over­much about the Mis­sion or the Village, than I’d even recom­mend that. The are some patholo­gies in Berkeley that are ac­tively bad, or good to get away from for awhile.

But you can’t trans­plant the 300 peo­ple here some­where else. It won’t work.

Why are cities more ex­pen­sive than ru­ral out­backs? Be­cause the cities have stuff, and the ru­ral out­backs don’t. Cities have jobs. Cities have enough crit­i­cal mass that no mat­ter your spe­cial in­ter­est, you can find peo­ple also in­ter­ested in that thing.

If you don’t need the Stuff cities offer, you can live some­where cheap. But em­piri­cally many peo­ple pre­fer pay­ing ex­tra for the stuff – that’s why cities are ex­pen­sive. The Most Im­por­tant Stuff is the net­work effects. And yes there’s some weird dystopian shit that go along with the net­work effects… but that doesn’t mean the net­work effects don’t mat­ter.

A lot of the mythos and ethos of the Village de­pends on the Mis­sion ac­tu­ally be­ing real. This means try­ing for real, which means mak­ing trade­offs for real, which means ac­tu­ally liv­ing near sili­con valley billion­aires and hav­ing good re­la­tion­ships with them – not only to get money from them, but to main­tain high lev­els of trust and al­ign­ment.

The Big Orgs need to be near the billion­aires and many ex­ist­ing ecosys­tems that sur­round them. The small orgs need to in­ter­face with the Big Orgs. The peo­ple who are in­ter­ested in work­ing for the small orgs, or Big Orgs, or found­ing new pro­jects that might one day in­ter­face with the sys­tem, need to be nearby.

The villagers who are just here to feed of their en­ergy are drawn here and not to ran­dom other places be­cause of that en­ergy, and crit­i­cal mass.

There might be other places that could sus­tain a Mis­sion Ori­ented Village, and you might be able to build a To­tally-Not-Mis­sion-Ori­ented-Village, but ei­ther case re­quires ac­tual strate­giz­ing and not just pick­ing a some­place ran­dom and cheap. (I think the EA Ho­tel has a de­cent shot at cre­at­ing an af­ford­able hub, but im­por­tantly, it in­volved thou­sands of dol­lars and years of free en­ergy in­jected into the sys­tem)

(Note that in­so­far as you think the Mis­sion is fake or in dan­ger of be­com­ing fake, yes, I think that means the Village is cor­re­spond­ingly weaker)

Does the Mis­sion need a Village that’s sep­a­rate from the Mis­sion?

Does the Mis­sion need the Village, or does the Village only need the Mis­sion?

The Mis­sion definitely needs to make sure the so­cial needs of its mem­bers are met. This in­cludes mak­ing sure they can make friends and can be psy­cholog­i­cally healthy.

There are mul­ti­ple strate­gies the Mis­sion could em­ploy for this, and I think most of them look some­thing like build­ing Mis­sion-cen­tric so­cial spaces. Habryka has some thoughts on this (differ­ent from mine), that make more sense to call a “uni­ver­sity” than a village.

But I think the Mis­sion still benefits from hav­ing a nearby Village where peo­ple get to ex­plore the Mis­sion, over a timescale of years. And for that to re­ally work, it needs to be a live op­tion to say “okay, it turned out the Mis­sion was not for me”, with­out mean­ing that the years you in­vested were wasted. (And, im­por­tantly, with­out pres­sure to de­ceive your­self about whether the Mis­sion is for you)

I don’t re­ally care about the Village. Should I?

Eh, prob­a­bly not.

To me, the Village and the Mis­sion are both deeply im­por­tant, and ob­vi­ously so. If you’re a Mis­sion ori­ented per­son who doesn’t feel like they’re lack­ing any­thing, or if this en­tire es­say feels pointless to you, I don’t think there’s a se­cret point I un­der­stand that you don’t that’ll change your mind.

You ei­ther feel that there’s some kind of village-shaped hole that you want to fill, or don’t.

I don’t live in Berkeley. Should I move there?

Maybe. But prob­a­bly not for the sake of the Village.

For years, the Village was ne­glected. Over the past cou­ple years, peo­ple have taken a stab at build­ing real Village In­sti­tu­tions. But we have a huge amount of so­cial-tech­nol­ogy-debt that we have yet to re­pay. The Village still strug­gles to take care of its own peo­ple.

I think it makes most sense to move to Berkeley if you already have a strong sense of who you would live with. It also makes sense if you already have a Mis­sion-re­lated-job lined up, since the Mis­sion ac­tu­ally has more in­fras­truc­ture built. And it makes sense if you’re will­ing to put a lot of effort into build­ing the Village (or Mis­sion) around you as you go.

A thing that works for some peo­ple is “visit there for a few months, and see what it is like, and whether you can suc­cess­fully find a home.”

Ask not what your Village can do for you.

Lately, I’ve been very Mis­sion fo­cused. I will con­tinue to be Mis­sion fo­cused.

But I want a good home. I want a good village to sup­port me dur­ing the times when I need help, and I want (coun­ter­fac­tu­ally, be­hind the veil of ig­no­rance) to have had bet­ter op­por­tu­ni­ties in Village-re­lated-do­mains.

In my own im­me­di­ate fu­ture, I want bet­ter op­por­tu­nity to strengthen friend­ships in re­peated low-stakes in­ter­ac­tions. Right now I’m able to do so, in part, be­cause of peo­ple who put time and effort into Village-es­que ac­tivi­ties. One of my wor­ries is that those peo­ple will burn out, or even­tu­ally tran­si­tion into more Mis­sion-es­que do­mains that con­sume more of their time, or sim­ply move away. And there are not enough peo­ple to re­place them, let alone strengthen the foun­da­tions.

If you are similar to me, you prob­a­bly want to spend at least a bit of your re­sources helping build the Village.

What does the Village need? I think there are ba­si­cally two lenses to look at this ques­tion.

“Low” Effort Things

What things can you do pe­ri­od­i­cally that will help the village, with­out cost­ing you much, if you don’t ex­pect to be able to com­mit to build­ing village in­sti­tu­tions longterm?

Ex­am­ples, es­ca­lat­ingly difficult, in­clude:

Meta:

First, main­tain 30% slack, as a gen­eral rule. Don’t overex­ert your­self. Make sure you have the spare re­sources to han­dle emer­gen­cies, oth­er­wise in­stead of helping you’ll end up need­ing help.

Keep your com­mit­ments, what­ever they are. (This may mean mak­ing fewer com­mit­ments, or be­ing clearer about how re­li­able you ex­pect to be. You can be a Prophet or a King)

Help pay money for things. (This can scale up and down pretty eas­ily). Don’t overdo it if you don’t have at least $10k in the bank to make switch­ing jobs and apart­ments eas­ier.

Gen­er­ally be a good citizen

If you’re at an event, no­tice what things the or­ga­nizer could use help with. Take out the trash. Greet peo­ple you haven’t met. In­tro­duce them to peo­ple you think they’d like and who’d like them.

Be a co-or­ga­nizer – for­mally agree to help out some­one run­ning an event.

Run a one-off party or meetup. Be de­liber­ate about who you in­vite – make sure to in­vite peo­ple who’ll have fun to­gether, but also try to in­vite some peo­ple you don’t know as well. Add sur­face area that lets peo­ple bump into each other and be­com­ing friends. The world de­pends on you throw­ing a party.

(You can turn one-off-par­ties into re­peated in­sti­tu­tions, al­though I recom­mend start­ing out just with the goal of try­ing a new thing with­out com­mit­ting to the long haul).

Ar­range your hous­ing situ­a­tion such that you can offer peo­ple a place to crash for a week. (This is part of a gen­eral strat­egy ad­vo­cated by Kel­sey Piper about mak­ing sure your com­mu­nity has the slack to ab­sorb ran­dom emer­gen­cies, help peo­ple when they lose their job, get them out of abu­sive situ­a­tions, etc)

No­tice when you are in a group with fences, enough such that it’s worth in­vest­ing in co­or­di­na­tion to make that group bet­ter. (Group houses are a good nat­u­ral fit for this)

Run the oc­ca­sional event that re­quires and/​or builds a skill (ra­tio­nal­ity skills or oth­er­wise). Th­ese are harder than a generic party, but they are the eas­ily-for­got­ten core of the village’s soul. I’ve seen peo­ple come to Berkeley and be dis­ap­pointed that most of the events felt like glo­rified speed-dat­ing. They came for the ra­tio­nal­ity and didn’t find any. There is pent-up de­mand for se­ri­ous growth (with­out the pres­sure that comes from work­ing on it pro­fes­sion­ally.)

High Effort, Long Com­mit­ment Things

Are you a com­pe­tent per­son who cares enough about the Village to stick around, and ac­tu­ally build Village In­sti­tu­tions that scale? Can you do so in a way that doesn’t burn you out?

Some things are only ac­tu­ally worth do­ing if you’re go­ing to stick with them.

The prob­lem where Com­pe­tent Peo­ple Are Rare and the World Is Big doesn’t just ap­ply to the Mis­sion, it ap­plies to the Village too. One of the rea­sons I think REACH is valuable is it pro­vides scal­able village goods – it’s ex­is­tence low­ers the bar­rier to en­try for hold­ing new events, and get­ting situ­a­tion.

I think we could use more things in this refer­ence class (which I think would plau­si­bly be worth se­ri­ous fundrais­ing for)

I sus­pect REACH could use more peo­ple that ded­i­cate se­ri­ous longterm effort to­wards mak­ing it run smoothly, and I think there is de­mand in the com­mu­nity for at least 1-2 ad­di­tional copies of REACH-es­que or­ga­ni­za­tions that run on differ­ent aes­thet­ics, op­er­ate in differ­ent neigh­bor­hoods, and tar­get differ­ent peo­ple.

Group Hous­ing – more/​bet­ter tools to help co­or­di­nate this.

Solv­ing Bureau­cracy for peo­ple. There could use to be some­one who knows all the doc­tors and ther­a­pists and hous­ing situ­a­tions in the area, who can help peo­ple nav­i­gate them.

Think hard about burnout and figure out how to help peo­ple sys­tem­at­i­cally with it.

This is par­tic­u­larly true if you have the skill of “figure out what needs do­ing and do it.” That skill is su­per rare. But if you can figure out what to do, then train some­one else to do it, and move on, you’re in a po­si­tion to add a lot of value.

In­tegrity and Accountability

Right now, the Village is fairly an­ar­chic. This seems fine – most of the ways to make it non-an­ar­chic seem more likely to turn it into a cum­ber­some bu­reau­cracy than to ac­tu­ally help.

This means, though, that the cur­rent mechanism for some­one do­ing a ma­jor pro­ject is “Pick up a flag, and start run­ning for­ward yel­ling ex­cit­edly, and hope that villagers and fun­ders run af­ter you.”

This has a few is­sues. The dy­namic be­tween Village lead­ers and fun­ders is stress­ful for both.

Fun­ders don’t com­mit enough to se­ri­ously helping with Village en­deav­ors for Village Or­ga­niz­ers to trust in the sys­tem. Village Or­ga­niz­ers don’t have much choice other than pick­ing up a flag and run for­ward with­out look­ing back. If they waited for fun­ders, noth­ing would ever get done.

But run­ning for­ward with a flag doesn’t have any kind of ac­countabil­ity built into the sys­tem. Since there’s so few Village pro­jects, fun­ders some­times feel vague pres­sure to sup­port what­ever *has* got­ten started, with­out re­ally check­ing if it’s good – and then later, they have to ei­ther cut fund­ing for some­thing that peo­ple have come to rely on (which sucks), or… keep fund­ing some­thing sub­par, po­ten­tially net nega­tive (which also sucks).

A com­mon mis­take is to make your­self ac­countable to “the pub­lic”, which means you can’t defend de­ci­sions with con­cepts more com­plex than about five words.

Another mis­take is not be ac­countable to any­one, or to only be ac­countable to peo­ple very similar to you. You need a wide enough va­ri­ety of peo­ple to be ac­countable to that you have a de­cent chance of get­ting called out on your mis­takes. You also need enough stake­hold­ers that you can build a large enough coal­i­tion to get the re­sources you need.

So my sug­ges­tion is to be pro-ac­tive about seek­ing out ac­countabil­ity. Find peo­ple you trust, who you will ac­tu­ally listen to, from a few differ­ent per­spec­tives, who can give you im­por­tant feed­back about how your pro­jects fit into the broader ecosys­tem. Be ready to change (or if nec­es­sary, abort) your pro­ject given their feed­back.

If you’re in the Village for the long haul, or want to build village-like spaces for the Mis­sion, chat with me.

I think the Village is quite im­por­tant, but there are a lot of nu­ances to get right when try­ing to build some­thing for it.

I’m fairly busy these days, and can’t meet with ev­ery­one. But if you’re in­ter­ested in se­ri­ous longterm Village work (say, putting at least 2 years into it, es­pe­cially if you’ve been pretty re­li­ably show­ing up and helping out in smaller ways), then I’m in­ter­ested in hav­ing a fairly se­ri­ous talk with you and helping to get you started.

i think en­tan­gle­ment be­tween mis­sion and liveli­hood already causes prob­lems. (you start feel­ing that the mis­sion is good b/​c it feeds you, and that an at­tack on the mis­sion is an at­tack on your abil­ity to feed your­self /​ earn in­come)

en­tan­gle­ment be­tween mis­sion and fam­ily/​home seems like it causes more of those prob­lems. (you start feel­ing that if your home is threat­ened in any way, this is a threat to the mis­sion, and if you feel that your mis­sion is threat­ened, it is a threat to your home.)

avoid­ing men­tal /​ emo­tional en­tan­gle­ment in this way i think would re­quire a very high bar: a mind well-trained in the art of { in­tro­spec­tion /​ med­i­ta­tion /​ small-iden­tity /​ sur­ren­der /​ re­lin­quish­ment } or some­thing in that area. i sus­pect <10 ppl in the com­mu­nity to meet that bar?

The epistemic con­cerns here (i.e. warp­ing your per­cep­tion of the mis­sion /​ home /​ re­sis­tance to giv­ing up ei­ther) are definitely the strongest ar­gu­ment I can see for mak­ing sure there is a non-mis­sion-cen­tered village.

I’m not sure I’m per­suaded, though, be­cause of the afore­men­tioned “some­thing needs to ori­ent and drive the com­mu­nity.” You could cer­tainly pick some­thing other than “The Mis­sion.” But what­ever you pick, you’re go­ing to end up with some­thing that you be­come overly at­tached to.

My ac­tual best guess is that the village should be ori­ented around truth­seek­ing and the mis­sion ori­ented around [truth­seek­ing and] im­pact.

I think if you are in the village and have bad epistemics, you should get at least sub­tle pres­sure to im­prove your epistemics (pos­si­bly less sub­tle pres­sure over time, es­pe­cially if you are tak­ing up memetic space). You should not re­ceive pres­sure for be­ing on board with the mis­sion, but you should re­ceive at least a lit­tle pres­sure to have thought a bit about the mis­sion and have some kind of opinion about it that ac­tu­ally en­gages with it.

Another com­po­nent here is to have more (healthy) com­pe­ti­tion among orgs. I’m still sort­ing out what this means when it comes to or­ga­ni­za­tions that sort-of-want-to-be-nat­u­ral-mo­nop­o­lies. But I think if there’s only one org do­ing [ra­tio­nal­ity train­ing /​ village in­fras­truc­ture /​ com­mu­ni­ca­tion in­fras­truc­ture] then you’re sort of forced to con­flate “is this thing good?” with “is this org do­ing a good job” along with “am I good for sup­port­ing them?”, which leads to weird bucket-er­rors.

My ac­tual best guess is that the village should be ori­ented around truth­seek­ing and the mis­sion ori­ented around [truth­seek­ing and] im­pact.

John Tooby has sug­gested that what­ever be­comes the ori­ent­ing thing of a com­mu­nity, be­comes au­to­mat­i­cally the sub­ject of mind-kil­ling im­pulses:

Coal­i­tion-mind­ed­ness makes ev­ery­one, in­clud­ing sci­en­tists, far stupi­der in coal­i­tional col­lec­tivi­ties than as in­di­vi­d­u­als. Para­dox­i­cally, a poli­ti­cal party united by su­per­nat­u­ral be­liefs can re­vise its be­liefs about eco­nomics or cli­mate with­out re­visers be­ing bad coal­i­tion mem­bers. But peo­ple whose coal­i­tional mem­ber­ship is con­sti­tuted by their shared ad­her­ence to “ra­tio­nal,” sci­en­tific propo­si­tions have a prob­lem when—as is gen­er­ally the case—new in­for­ma­tion arises which re­quires be­lief re­vi­sion. To ques­tion or dis­agree with coal­i­tional pre­cepts, even for ra­tio­nal rea­sons, makes one a bad and im­moral coal­i­tion mem­ber—at risk of los­ing job offers, one’s friends, and one’s cher­ished group iden­tity. This freezes be­lief re­vi­sion.

Form­ing coal­i­tions around sci­en­tific or fac­tual ques­tions is dis­as­trous, be­cause it pits our urge for sci­en­tific truth-seek­ing against the nearly in­su­per­a­ble hu­man ap­petite to be a good coal­i­tion mem­ber. Once sci­en­tific propo­si­tions are mor­al­ized, the sci­en­tific pro­cess is wounded, of­ten fatally. No one is be­hav­ing ei­ther eth­i­cally or sci­en­tifi­cally who does not make the best case pos­si­ble for ri­val the­o­ries with which one dis­agrees.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this makes truth­seek­ing a bad idea to ori­ent around, since there does seem to be a way to ori­ent around it in a way which avoids this failure mode, but at least one should be very cau­tious about how ex­actly.

If I think of the com­mu­ni­ties which I’ve seen that seem to have suc­cess­fully ori­ented around truth­seek­ing to some ex­tent, the differ­ence seems to be some­thing like a pro­cess vs. con­tent dis­tinc­tion. Peo­ple aren’t go­ing around ex­plic­itly swear­ing alle­giance to ra­tio­nal­ity, but they are con­stantly sig­nal­ing a truth­seek­ing ori­en­ta­tion through their be­hav­ior, such as by ac­tively look­ing for other peo­ple’s cruxes in con­ver­sa­tion and in­di­cat­ing their own.

peo­ple whose coal­i­tional mem­ber­ship is con­sti­tuted by their shared ad­her­ence to “ra­tio­nal,” sci­en­tific propo­si­tions have a prob­lem when—as is gen­er­ally the case—new in­for­ma­tion arises which re­quires be­lief re­vi­sion.

My first re­ac­tion was that per­haps the com­mu­nity should be cen­tered around up­dat­ing on ev­i­dence rather than any spe­cific sci­ence.

But of course, that can fail, too. For ex­am­ple, peo­ple can sig­nal their virtue by up­dat­ing on tinier and tinier pieces of ev­i­dence. Like, when the prob­a­bil­ity in­creases from 0.000001 to 0.0000011, peo­ple start yel­ling about how this changes ev­ery­thing, and if you say “huh, for me that is al­most no change at all”, you be­come the un­wor­thy one who re­fuses to up­date in face of ev­i­dence.

(The peo­ple up­dat­ing on the tiny ev­i­dence most likely won’t even be tech­ni­cally cor­rect, be­cause pur­pose­fully look­ing for micro­scopic pieces of ev­i­dence will nat­u­rally in­tro­duce se­lec­tion bias and dou­ble count­ing.)

Peo­ple aren’t go­ing around ex­plic­itly swear­ing alle­giance to ra­tio­nal­ity, but they are con­stantly sig­nal­ing a truth­seek­ing ori­en­ta­tion through their be­hav­ior, such as by ac­tively look­ing for other peo­ple’s cruxes in con­ver­sa­tion and in­di­cat­ing their own.

I think that there are a few plau­si­ble the­o­ries of the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity and how they re­late to the mis­sion:

[0] Null hy­poth­e­sis: no con­nec­tion. This is ob­vi­ously im­plau­si­ble if you’ve spent 3 sec­onds around the com­mu­nity or its mis­sion.

1. The com­mu­nity and the mis­sion are the same. Even the less im­me­di­ately rele­vant ac­tivi­ties cre­ate an in­tel­lec­tual and so­cial mi­lieu which is con­ducive to progress. The abil­ity to en­gage with other in­tel­lec­tu­als at low cost to one­self means that in­sights are shared be­tween key in­di­vi­d­u­als at faster rate. The com­mu­nity pro­vides high value to the mis­sion by en­abling it. The mis­sion pro­vides high value to the com­mu­nity.

2. The com­mu­nity ex­ists at least in part to play in­terfer­ence for the mis­sion­ar­ies. Be­ing able to do real think­ing means a cer­tain de­gree of in­su­la­tion from the real world; hav­ing fewer de­mands on your time, hav­ing your ba­sic hu­man needs taken care of, hav­ing the abil­ity to en. The com­mu­nity pro­vides medium value to the mis­sion by shield­ing it. The mis­sion pro­vides low value to the com­mu­nity, be­cause the com­mu­nity’s strength de­rives from el­se­where. I think this is what you are ad­vo­cat­ing, and it’s one that I like.

3. The com­mu­nity [in ag­gre­gate] puts the min­i­mum effort to­wards the mis­sion to look con­vinc­ing be­cause if it were to openly ad­mit that it doesn’t ac­tu­ally care about the mis­sion peo­ple would leave. Peo­ple are all here be­cause pre­tend­ing to have a shared goal is as good as ac­tu­ally hav­ing one in terms of bring­ing peo­ple to­gether. The com­mu­nity pro­vides slightly pos­i­tive value to the mis­sion, but self­ishly. The mis­sion pro­vides high value to the com­mu­nity.

4. The com­mu­nity ex­ists as a so­cial past­time with no clear pur­pose. It ex­ists as a space not for real con­cern about x-risk, but pri­mar­ily as a so­cial out­growth of the tech sec­tor, a safe space for weird­ness. The com­mu­nity de­tracts from the mis­sion by ex­ert­ing, even un­in­ten­tion­ally, a so­cial pres­sure upon mis­sion­ar­ies to regress to the mean. The mis­sion pro­vides no value to the com­mu­nity.

I’m re­al­iz­ing that I need to make the fol­low­ing dis­tinc­tion here:

Village 1) There is a core of folks in the village that are do­ing a hard thing (Mis­sion). and also their friends, fam­ily, and neigh­bors who sup­port them and each other but are not di­rectly in­volved in the Mis­sion.

Village 2) There is a village with only ppl who are do­ing the di­rect Mis­sion work. Other friends, fam­ily, etc. do not make their homes in the village.

I weakly think it’s pos­si­ble for 1 to be good.

I think 2 runs into lots of prob­lems and is what my origi­nal com­ment was speak­ing against.

(I think it may be cor­rect to have mul­ti­ple over­lap­ping-and-or-con­cen­tric cir­cles, where there’s a village that’s “Mis­sion + friends/​fam­ily/​neigh­bors”, which re­al­is­ti­cally also just grows or­gan­i­cally over time)

And then there’s some­thing that maybe is bet­ter to call a “Mis­sion com­mu­nity” than “Mis­sion village” which isn’t try­ing to be a village per se, but is just mak­ing sure that peo­ple in­volved in the Mis­sion get the op­por­tu­nity to con­nect more over Mis­sion stuff speci­fi­cally. (Which is prob­a­bly less pub­lic fac­ing, but which maybe oc­ca­sion­ally has more open in­vite events so that peo­ple who are in­ter­ested in tran­si­tion­ing into the Mis­sion have op­por­tu­nity to do so).

If Mis­sion re­quires a lot of work (or isn’t paid well, so you need an ex­tra job to pay your bills), peo­ple will have to re­duce their in­volve­ment when they have kids. And most peo­ple are go­ing to have kids at some mo­ment of their lives.

On the other hand, Village with­out kids… should more prop­erly be called Ho­tel or Cam­pus.

Thus, Village helps Mis­sion by keep­ing cur­rently in­ac­tive peo­ple close, so even if you can­not use their work at the mo­ment, you can still use some of their ex­per­tise. Also, the in­volve­ment doesn’t have to be “all or noth­ing”; peo­ple with school-age kids can be part-time in­volved.

Mis­sion with­out Village will keep los­ing tacit knowl­edge, and will prob­a­bly have to make stronger pres­sure on keep­ing and re­cruit­ing mem­bers. (Which can be­come a pos­i­tive feed­back loop, if mem­bers start leav­ing be­cause of in­creased pres­sure, and the pres­sure in­creases as a re­ac­tion to the threat of los­ing mem­bers.)

“Real Mis­sion Work” gen­er­ally takes the form of an ac­tual full-time job (many new pro­jects start off as a weird scrappy hy­brid of “ran­dom pro­ject /​ startup”, but IMO ba­si­cally the goal is to tran­si­tion into se­ri­ous ful­l­time work once you’ve demon­strated that you are ca­pa­ble enough to get fund­ing)

Mis­sion work varies in how much it’s like a startup, and how much it’s like an or­di­nary non-startup-job. Startup-like mis­sion-orgs are prob­a­bly hard to work at if you have kids. (I think I re­call Paul Gra­ham or some­one claiming that you can pick two: Startup, Hob­bies, Kids. So you might have kids but not oth­er­wise have a life, and shouldn’t have both par­ents be startup-ing)

I think I still gen­er­ally agree with the points you make about keep­ing in­ac­tive peo­ple in the cir­cle, and that a village with­out kids makes more sense to see through the Cam­pus lens.

I think there is a dis­tinc­tion be­tween village and home, and that they can have some­what differ­ent fo­cused. That a home can be home cen­tered while a village can be mis­sion-cen­tered. I’m not sure this is the ideal ar­range­ment, but I put some weight on it be­ing so.

The al­ter­na­tive is to live in a village that is not mis­sion cen­tered. I’m wor­ried that will pre­clude many kinds of suc­cess­ful mis­sions.

I was fairly hes­i­tant to post this. A cou­ple beta-read­ers pointed out that reify­ing “village” and “mis­sion” in this way might an­chor peo­ple, or cre­ate fac­tion­al­iza­tion, in a way that caused more prob­lems than it solved.

I also re­al­ized, dur­ing a sec­ond draft, that I didn’t have a clear cut goal with this es­say. There is nei­ther a clear prin­ci­ple I wanted peo­ple to un­der­stand, nor a par­tic­u­lar ac­tion I wanted them to take. And mean­while this es­say is sort of throw­ing a poli­ti­cally charged con­cept into the eco-sys­tem, which I may not have the time to prop­erly defend or en­sure gets “used for good.”

I spent a few hours think­ing “okay, I guess maybe I just won’t post it” and award­ing my­self Virtue of Silence points.

Ob­vi­ously those points are re­tracted now. :P

I went ahead and posted it for two rea­sons:

I think the con­cept of the Village and the Mis­sion do ac­cu­rately de­scribe what is cur­rently hap­pen­ing. Even if they aren’t the right frame of what should be hap­pen­ing, it’s im­por­tant to start with a re­al­is­tic map.

Se­cond, the whole rea­son I wrote this up this week (I’ve been putting off writ­ing this for a year), is hav­ing re­cently had a cou­ple con­ver­sa­tions wherein the first thing I had to do was sum­ma­rize this en­tire post, to get peo­ple up to speed on where I was com­ing from.

I set­tled on tag­ging the post more clearly as a brain­dump. I’ll try to write up some al­ter­nate frames on how to look at the en­tire sys­tem to avoid overly an­chor­ing on the Village/​Mis­sion break­down.

I figured I should be clearer about what I ac­tual plan to be do­ing with all this:

1. I, per­son­ally, am try­ing to figure out a plan for im­prov­ing the “Mis­sion com­mu­nity”, with mod­er­ately high fences. I think this is the right use of my cur­rent po­si­tion and skil­lset. I do not yet have a plan.

1b. A sub­set of the above is see­ing who is in­ter­ested in con­tribut­ing to a Mis­sion com­mu­nity, and what par­tic­u­lar things they are mo­ti­vated to do. Who and what is available would de­ter­mine what sort of plans are pos­si­ble.

2. I want to help peo­ple who are in­ter­ested in helping sig­nifi­cantly with the village self-or­ga­nize bet­ter. This in­volves a cou­ple things:

2a. Get­ting a sense of who is already work­ing on what.

2b. Get­ting a sense of who is available to put more en­ergy into what.

2c. Get­ting a sense of what needs do­ing.

2d. Clar­ify­ing some of my own think­ing on what failure modes to watch out for, and what ex­per­i­ments make sense to try next.

2e. The pro­cess of chat­ting with a bunch of peo­ple who are in­ter­ested in con­tribut­ing can then provide an op­por­tu­nity to get peo­ple more al­igned, such that peo­ple are work­ing on pro­jects that fit to­gether syn­er­gis­ti­cally.

2f. Pro­vid­ing men­tor­ship/​guidance in the do­mains where I feel like I have use­ful guidance to offer. (My own self-im­posed rule is no longer be di­rectly re­spon­si­ble for things in the village, but to con­tribute effort when I rea­son­ably ex­pect that effort to in­crease over­all village longterm lead­er­ship ca­pac­ity)

I still feel like the ideal solu­tion is Archipelago – rather than try­ing to have one village and one mis­sion, there should be mul­ti­ple over­lap­ping clusters as­piring to­wards differ­ent things. I think this is healthier both from a “va­ri­ety” stand­point as well as avoid­ing cer­tain kinds of poli­ti­cal con­flict. The prob­lem with Archipelago is that it’s very lead­er­ship con­strained – you need peo­ple who can both up­hold stan­dards and help peo­ple to learn them, but also to provide value that makes those stan­dards worth liv­ing up to, at­tract­ing peo­ple.

Some village-pro­jects that I think make sense in­clude:

Strength­en­ing in­di­vi­d­ual group houses (prob­a­bly have an up­com­ing blog­post on this)

Run­ning mid-size events that are rel­a­tively low effort (right now there are a cou­ple ma­jor com­mu­nity events each year – Sum­mer/​Win­ter Sols­tice, and EA Global and CFAR Re­u­nion. I think there could be at least 2 lower key spring/​au­tumn events that are large but less effort­ful)

I would love to read an overview of things that are be­ing done, in the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity. By read­ing Less Wrong reg­u­larly, I am ex­posed to many ran­dom things, but I may have large blind spots. I would like to see the cu­rated big pic­ture.

In ad­di­tion to big pic­ture (list of mee­tups or pod­casts or re­search groups), it would be also nice to have a database of helpful peo­ple (who or­ga­nize the mee­tups, or bring cook­ies), but the later should prob­a­bly not be pub­lic. I have heard sto­ries of peo­ple who come to ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity with the goal of ex­tract­ing free work (un­der vague and non-com­mit­tal promises of im­prov­ing the world or con­tribut­ing to char­ity) from naive peo­ple. So, if some­one loves to bake cook­ies and bring them to mee­tups, it would be nice to give their con­tact to lo­cal meetup or­ga­niz­ers, but not to make it com­pletely pub­lic so that ran­dom par­a­sites will spam them. Maybe a triv­ial in­con­ve­nience of “show me the spe­cific work you have already done, be­fore I give you the list of con­tacts” would be enough.

Here is my brain dump: I have mostly given up on the Berkeley ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity as a pos­si­ble village. I think the peo­ple who showed up here were mostly se­lected for be­ing bad at villag­ing, and that the awful shit that’s been hap­pen­ing around here lately is down­stream of that. I think there is some­thing toxic /​ dys­func­tional wo­ven deep into the com­mu­nity fabric (which has some­thing to do with the ways in which the Mis­sion in­ter­acts poorly with peo­ple’s psy­cholo­gies) and I don’t feel very hope­ful about even be­ing able to show it clearly to half of the com­mu­nity, let alone do­ing any­thing about it.

In Fe­bru­ary I wrote a 20-page Google Doc de­scribing what I think is wrong with Berkeley in more de­tail, which I’ve shared with some of you but don’t plan to make pub­lic. (Mes­sage me on Face­book if you’d like to re­quest ac­cess to a PDF of it; I might not say yes, though.) I’d like to get around to writ­ing a sec­ond pub­lic draft but again, I’ve been feel­ing less hope­ful, so… we’ll see.

I’ve been get­ting a fair num­ber of re­quests on Face­book for the doc (esp. from com­mu­nity or­ga­niz­ers, which I ap­pre­ci­ate), and re­sponse has been pretty pos­i­tive. That plus a few other things have me more in­clined to write a pub­lic draft, but still a lit­tle wary of mak­ing promises yet.

(I have thoughts on this, but prob­a­bly makes sense to wait to com­ment here about it un­til it’s at a point where a more fully pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion is pos­si­ble. My short take is ‘I roughly agree that the dy­nam­ics Qiaochu is point­ing at are real/​im­por­tant, but I don’t think they ap­ply uni­ver­sally – they feel less rele­vant to me per­son­ally, and I think there’s some­thing like com­pet­ing ac­cess needs go­ing on.’)

For a re­lated no­tion, let me re­late some things about sangha, as I tend to think it’s a good model for the kind of com­mu­nity that is likely shaped to fit the pre­sent situ­a­tion.

“Sangha” is a San­skrit word usu­ally trans­lated as “com­mu­nity”. It has a cou­ple differ­ent mean­ings within Bud­dhism. One is mis­sion fo­cused: ev­ery­one is a mem­ber of the ideal sangha that tran­scends any par­tic­u­lar space and time who has, in var­i­ous defi­ni­tions, taken the three re­fuges, taken the pre­cepts, achieved stream en­try, or is oth­er­wise some­how on The Path. Another is lo­ca­tion fo­cused: “sangha” can re­fer to the spe­cific com­mu­nity in a par­tic­u­lar monastery, or­der, lineage, prac­tice cen­ter, etc. of peo­ple who are “com­mit­ted” or “se­ri­ous” in one of the ways just enu­mer­ated. There are some oth­ers but those are the ones that seem rele­vant here.

Some things might look on the out­side like sangha but might not be. For ex­am­ple, I fa­cil­i­tate a weekly med­i­ta­tion meetup at the REACH. It’s not re­ally a sangha, though, be­cause lots of peo­ple ca­su­ally drop in who may or may not have com­mit­ted them­selves to liber­a­tion from suffer­ing, they just want a place to prac­tice or to hang out with some cool peo­ple or some­thing else. And that’s fine; the point of a group like this is to be ac­cessible in a way a sangha is not be­cause al­though a sangha may be wel­com­ing (the lo­cal one to which I be­long cer­tainly tries to be), many peo­ple bounce off sang­has be­cause, I the­o­rize, they aren’t ready to make the kind of com­mit­ment that re­ally be­ing part of one asks of you.*

*Be­cause sangha will ask for com­mit­ment, even if you just try to be a “ca­sual”—there’s not re­ally a way to do the equiv­a­lent of hid­ing in the pews in the back. And it’s not the way you can’t hide in an Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tian group where you will be point­edly asked about your se­ri­ous­ness and shunned if you aren’t com­mit­ted. Rather it’s like the prac­tice per­vades ev­ery­thing around the sangha and if you get too close to it and want to main­tain dis­tance you’ll feel very out-of-place.

And there’s the op­po­site situ­a­tion, where a sangha may be real but not look much like it to out­siders. Some­times this is just two friends com­ing to­gether who are fel­low stream win­ners who cre­ate sangha through their ev­ery in­ter­ac­tion with each other, but to an out­sider they might just look like good friends and not see the deeper con­nec­tion to prac­tice per­vad­ing their re­la­tion­ship.

The point be­ing, sangha is some­thing spe­cial, valuable, with real but some­what fuzzy bor­ders, and a strong com­mit­ment to a “mis­sion”.

Now, our com­mu­nity (the one Ray is talk­ing about here) hasn’t ex­isted for long enough that we’ve had time to come to agree­ment on just what the crite­ria for in­clu­sion are (or, put an­other way, ex­actly how we would phrase what the mis­sion is, though I like what Ray says above), but what­ever it is we can use this as the foun­da­tion of our com­mu­nity. I’ve seen in my time in Berkeley that, in my es­ti­ma­tion, the mis­sion is strong and pow­er­fully cre­ates a cen­ter of grav­ity that pulls in peo­ple suffi­ciently al­igned with it and pushes out peo­ple who are not, usu­ally not by force but be­cause they sim­ply get pul­led away by other in­ter­ests be­cause al­though they might care about the mis­sion some, they don’t care about it so much to make it a top pri­or­ity in their life. This to me makes it like a sangha, but rather than a com­mu­nity com­mit­ted to en­light­en­ment it’s a com­mu­nity com­mit­ted to long-term flour­ish­ing.

To me this sug­gests a cou­ple things about how to build what Ray has called the village:

Keep the mis­sion strong. The mis­sion is the thing that holds the village to­gether.

Leave the village open. The mis­sion is both lighthouse and craggy shore that draws some peo­ple in and keeps other peo­ple out of the metaphor­i­cal har­bor of the village be­cause thread­ing the cur­rents to the har­bor’s mouth is just hard enough that it keeps out any­one who doesn’t deeply care about the mis­sion but not so hard as to keep out any­one who is se­ri­ous.

Fix up the village. Right now the village is like a shanty town built around a small fort. Things in the fort are okay, but it’s a re­mote out­post far from home, re­quires fre­quently re­sup­ply from the out­side, and the shanty town is bet­ter than liv­ing rough and more a place than any­thing else nearby the fort, but that’s about it. I be­lieve most of the prob­lems are not a con­se­quence of keep­ing the mis­sion strong or leav­ing the village open, but of not car­ing for the village.

This is an in­ter­est­ing take on it, and it res­onated more strongly that I was ex­pect­ing. It matches my per­sonal ex­pe­rience (i.e it was not hard to no­tice lit­tle op­por­tu­ni­ties to in­cre­men­tally in­crease my com­mit­ment to the mis­sion, and if I was less in­ter­ested, I might have drifted away in­stead).

But my im­pres­sion is this is not true for ev­ery­one. One clearcut thing is that there’s a cer­tain thresh­old of agency and self-effi­cacy that some­one needs to have demon­strated be­fore I feel com­fortable invit­ing them to mis­sion-cen­tric spaces (over the longterm), and I think I’m not alone in that. I think there are peo­ple who have “mixed com­pe­ten­cies”, where they’ve got­ten good at some things but not oth­ers, and they want to be able to help the mis­sion, and there are sub­tle and not-so-sub­tle so­cial forces that push them away.

And I’m not sure there’s any­thing wrong with that, but it seems im­por­tant to ac­knowl­edge.

A ma­jor prompt for this post was read­ing Sarah’s the Craft is Not The Com­mu­nity post, where my im­pres­sion is that she hadn’t run into ra­tio­nal­ity-com­mu­nity pro­jects that ac­tu­ally seemed out­ward fac­ing and valuable (and per­haps had run into a few pro­jects that seemed to think them­selves as be­ing out­ward fac­ing, but didn’t ac­tu­ally seem that valuable).

It was weird to me that Sarah’s so­cial graph re­sulted in that ex­pe­rience.

This whole post was ba­si­cally a re­ac­tion to that, where it seemed to me a) that I do in fact run into orgs try­ing to make real world re­sults hap­pen, b) my ex­pe­rience with the village has always been “helps you get ready for the Mis­sion but isn’t the Mis­sion.”

But my im­pres­sion is this is not true for ev­ery­one. One clearcut thing is that there’s a cer­tain thresh­old of agency and self-effi­cacy that some­one needs to have demon­strated be­fore I feel com­fortable invit­ing them to mis­sion-cen­tric spaces (over the longterm), and I think I’m not alone in that. I think there are peo­ple who have “mixed com­pe­ten­cies”, where they’ve got­ten good at some things but oth­ers, and they want to be able to help the mis­sion, and there are sub­tle and not-so-sub­tle so­cial forces that push them away.

And I’m not sure there’s any­thing wrong with that, but it seems im­por­tant to ac­knowl­edge.

I think there’s some­thing proper in the func­tion of a sangha (and by ex­ten­sion, our com­mu­nity) that it dis­cour­ages those who don’t have, as you put it, the “agency and self-effi­cacy” to prop­erly en­gage in the mis­sion, and also pushes out those who are only half in it, such that what I can imag­ine as “mixed com­pe­ten­cies” re­sults in them not stay­ing de­spite the fact that they could have stayed if they had been more com­mit­ted and will­ing to make space for them­selves in a place that was will­ing to tol­er­ate them but not usher them in.

Of course, it feels a bit weird be­cause in sangha that’s di­rectly tied to the pur­pose of the com­mu­nity and can be done skil­lfully as part of trans­mit­ting the dharma, whereas in our com­mu­nity this seems at cross-pur­poses with the mis­sion and can feel to some like defect­ing on pay­ing the cost to train and de­velop the peo­ple it needs. Prob­a­bly this is part of what sets apart sangha from other forms of com­mu­nity: it’s shape is di­rectly tied to its func­tion, and is a nat­u­ral ex­ten­sion of the mis­sion, where el­se­where other shapes could be adopted be­cause the mis­sion does not di­rectly sug­gest one.

I gen­er­ally agree with the call to ac­tion. I have a his­tor­i­cal cri­tique.

I think you are mis­taken about the na­ture of villages be­ing au­to­mat­i­cally bound to­gether; I think this er­ror is sur­vivor­ship bias. Most set­tle­ments that have ever ex­isted did so ephemer­ally: ex­ist­ing pri­mar­ily for the ex­trac­tion of a sin­gle re­source (min­ing towns), or for a sin­gle goal (mil­i­tary gar­ri­sons). What you see as nat­u­ral cul­tural bonds and com­mu­ni­ties are a mark of sta­bil­ity, a his­tor­i­cal ex­am­ple of a group that has solved (at least for a lit­tle time) the prob­lem that the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity is work­ing through, not one that has in­her­ited it by nat­u­ral right.

To re­fac­tor the anal­y­sis with this in mind, we will ba­si­cally look at what makes those com­mu­ni­ties sta­ble, and how ours com­pares. I think it is at least the fol­low­ing:

1. The pres­ence of mul­ti­ple in­dus­tries. A typ­i­cal farm­ing village will grow mul­ti­ple crops, pos­sess hunters and log­gers, mil­lers and bak­ers; be able to provide for it­self and also pro­duce a sur­plus. Think of it as a di­verse bas­ket. We’re nar­row on this front. Mostly con­cen­trated in tech and in the mis­sion.

2. A high de­gree of in­ter­mar­riage. Maybe polyamory is a good sub­sti­tute and quick workaround? De­spite cer­tain benefits it pro­vides I still doubt polyamory is sus­tain­able on a multi­gen­er­a­tional scale.

3. Not be­ing con­stantly un­der siege. Strong com­mu­ni­ties can get through tough times bet­ter than weak ones, but not in­evitably so. His­tor­i­cally (think Oxford) the solu­tion for in­tel­lec­tu­als is to find wealthy pa­trons and/​or gov­ern­ment sup­port. Looks like we’ve got the first.

I do not think “cul­ture” is ac­tu­ally a fac­tor here; it’s a weasel word that de­serves a taboo in this com­mu­nity. I think “cul­ture” tends to be, at a pop­u­la­tion level, an adap­ta­tion to poli­ti­cal and ma­te­rial cir­cum­stances that sur­round that com­mu­nity. Cul­tures do not tend to­wards sta­bil­ity. This is once again sur­vivor­ship bias.

Hmm. I agree that sur­vivor­ship bias could eas­ily be a force at play here, but not sure about some of your spe­cific sub­claims here. (I haven’t read the books listed, al­though I think I’ve maybe read sum­maries of the Art of Not Be­ing Governed. Will check out both of them)

There’s two some­what differ­ent things, which are “meet­ing peo­ple’s needs in the mo­ment” and “be­ing sta­ble/​sus­tain­able.” Which do seem like when done right they should go hand in hand, but I’m not en­tirely sure it makes sense to be sus­tain­able in the clas­si­cal village sense. (A uni­ver­sity is sta­ble in ways differ­ent from a village, al­though many of the same mechanisms are there in some form)

Some of the things I’ve heard or en­coun­tered that played a role in my think­ing (not all of these are nec­es­sar­ily coun­ter­ing your points, some are just paint­ing a pic­ture of where I’m com­ing from and clar­ify­ing what ev­i­dence I ac­tu­ally have that there’s a real thing here).

1. A friend claiming that work­ing on a mil­i­tary sub­marine, forced to work to­gether with a small group of peo­ple in sar­dine can sized ves­sel, where if any­one of them fucked up they could be en­tombed in the sea, which he de­scribed as pro­duc­ing the tight­est bonds he ever felt, which he ex­pected to be hard to imag­ine. (This points a bit against sin­gle-oc­cu­pa­tion towns nec­es­sar­ily hav­ing any is­sues re: trust/​sta­bil­ity. I do ex­pect di­verse oc­cu­pa­tions to be use­ful for other rea­sons though)

2. The fact that, at NYC Sun­day Assem­bly (an at­tempted athe­ist church), ex-Chris­ti­ans de­scribe how close their church was, how peo­ple would take care of each other, how they felt con­nected, and this was so good, and athe­ist com­mu­ni­ties were so mediocre, that for many of them their de­fault course of ac­tion was to just keep hang­ing out in the re­li­gious com­mu­ni­ties ’cuz they were just bet­ter at it than the athe­ist com­mu­ni­ties.

3. A cou­ple ex­pe­riences I’ve had vol­un­teer­ing to main­tain parks and gar­dens, which in­volved a lot of man­ual la­bor, while talk­ing with other peo­ple in a lo­cal com­mu­nity which felt… re­ally good and whole­some. It felt good to work with my hands, it felt good to work to­gether. It was in fact quite weird and sad that at the end of the day, I said out loud “huh. So, that felt re­ally good… and I feel like I should do that all the time, for my phys­i­cal and emo­tional well be­ing… and I can tell that I’m not go­ing to, and am just go­ing to get swept up into atomic in­di­vi­d­u­al­ist land again.”

4. In gen­eral, hear­ing many peo­ple, from the­ater troupes to mil­i­tary peo­ple to peo­ple run­ning events where a small team had to de­pend on each other, about the tight bonds they form.

5. Hear­ing de­scrip­tions of the MAPLE monastery where some ra­tio­nal­ists have gone, and a cluster of de­pend­abil­ity skills that it seemed to foster

6. Scott’s de­scrip­tion of his ex­pe­rience with com­mu­ni­ties in Con­cept Shaped Holes (both in see­ing “real” com­mu­ni­ties that seemed to have some­thing deep that he hadn’t even known ex­isted, and his ex­pe­riences with the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity demon­strat­ing at least be­ing some­what closer to that end of the spec­trum).

All of this seems to point to there be­ing some­thing real here, which does re­quire effort to adapt to the 21st cen­tury, and re­quire skill and sac­ri­fice to im­ple­ment even in it’s usual form. But which… seems rea­son­ably straight­for­ward as far as things go. Atomic Liber­tar­i­ans might have a hard time im­ple­ment­ing it but that’s more of a fact about them than about it.

Could some of this be con­nected to the “geek so­cial fal­la­cies”? Speci­fi­cally: some peo­ple seem to be a com­mu­nity ma­te­rial; some peo­ple seem cor­ro­sive to any com­mu­nity; most are prob­a­bly some­where on the spec­trum. If you try to make a com­mu­nity that in­cludes the cor­ro­sive peo­ple, it will quickly and in­evitably fall apart. How­ever, some com­mu­ni­ties have “in­clu­sion” as their ap­plause light, so it re­quires some de­gree of hypocrisy and tacit co­or­di­na­tion to nav­i­gate this suc­cess­fully.

I sup­pose that even the re­li­gious com­mu­ni­ties who try to save ev­ery­one’s soul, are ul­ti­mately ex­clu­sive. This hap­pens in two ways:

First, “do­ing some ac­tual work” filters out lazy peo­ple, or peo­ple who pre­fer talk­ing about things to ac­tu­ally do­ing things. There are peo­ple who could end­lessly talk about helping the poor; but if you ask for vol­un­teers who will cook the soup for the home­less, when the time comes to ac­tu­ally cook the soup, these talk­ers will not be there. Good!

Se­cond, some peo­ple take more than they give, but you can bal­ance this by mak­ing “tak­ing” low sta­tus, and “giv­ing” high sta­tus; and then hav­ing the high-sta­tus peo­ple meet sep­a­rately. So you spend one af­ter­noon cook­ing the soup and giv­ing it to the home­less; but then you spend an­other af­ter­noon or two with the fel­low cooks in a place where the home­less peo­ple are not in­vited.

So, on one level you have peo­ple who love ev­ery­one so much that they even spend their free time cook­ing soups for the home­less. But on an­other level, you have a clever al­gorithm to filter out a kind of elite—peo­ple who are al­tru­is­tic and will­ing to work—and have them net­work with each other, in ab­sence of the less wor­thy ones. No one men­tions this ex­plic­itly, be­cause de­bat­ing it ex­plic­itly would prob­a­bly ruin the effect, if peo­ple un­in­ter­ested in cook­ing soup for the home­less would start par­ti­ci­pat­ing any­way, be­cause they would re­al­ize the benefits of net­work­ing with al­tru­is­tic and hard-work­ing ones.

I sus­pect that the athe­ist com­mu­nity meetup will be full of an­noy­ing and dis­agree­able peo­ple who would filter them­selves out from the “re­li­gious peo­ple cook­ing soup for the home­less” meetup. They don’t have to be all an­noy­ing and dis­agree­able, of course, but even a few of them can ruin the at­mo­sphere.

Co­or­di­nat­ing on­line prob­a­bly also makes things worse. When you an­nounce an ac­tivity, peo­ple who dis­like the ac­tivity will give vo­cal feed­back, and you sud­denly find your­self in a de­bate with them, which is a com­plete waste of your time. As op­posed to an­nounc­ing the time and place on a flyer, so that peo­ple who are in­ter­ested will come, and the peo­ple who are not will stay at home.

In my per­sonal ex­pe­rience, I found the high­est qual­ity peo­ple in var­i­ous vol­un­teer groups. Doesn’t mat­ter what: they could be cam­paign­ing for hu­man rights, or­ga­niz­ing a sum­mer camp for kids, prepar­ing ed­u­ca­tional re­form ma­te­ri­als, or mow­ing a meadow to save en­dan­gered plant species. Some of these ac­tivi­ties have spe­cific filters on pro­fes­sion or poli­ti­cal al­ign­ment, but each of them at the same times filters for… I am not sure I can de­scribe it cor­rectly, but it is a good filter.

Co­or­di­nat­ing on­line prob­a­bly also makes things worse. When you an­nounce an ac­tivity, peo­ple who dis­like the ac­tivity will give vo­cal feed­back, and you sud­denly find your­self in a de­bate with them, which is a com­plete waste of your time.

In my ex­pe­rience if some­one sets up an event via face­book peo­ple who don’t like the ac­tivity sim­ply de­cide against com­ing. I can’t re­mem­ber cases where that lead to longer dis­cus­sions. Is your ex­pe­rience differ­ent?

I had in mind the pro­pos­als to or­ga­nize (1) Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion and (2) Dragon Army, on Less Wrong.

From my per­spec­tive, both cases were “hey, I have an idea of a weird but po­ten­tially awe­some ac­tivity, here is an out­line, con­tact me if you are in­ter­ested”, and in both cases, the de­bate was mostly about why this is a hor­rible thing to do, be­cause only cultists would or­ga­nize a weird ac­tivity in real life.

The Dragon Army pushed the Over­ton win­dow so far that now it makes difficult to re­mem­ber what ex­actly was so hor­rify­ing about the Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion. But back then, the mere idea of singing to­gether was quite trig­ger­ing for a few peo­ple: singing is an ir­ra­tional ac­tivity, it ma­nipu­lates your emo­tions, it in­creases group co­he­sion which rubs con­trar­i­ans the wrong way, it’s what re­li­gious peo­ple do, yadda yadda yadda, there­fore meet­ing with a group of friends and singing a song to­gether means aban­don­ing your ra­tio­nal­ity for­ever.

Now, the Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion is a perfectly nor­mal thing, and no one freaks out about it any­more. And I sup­pose if there would be a sec­ond and third at­tempt to do some­thing like the Dragon Army, peo­ple would get used to that, too. But the re­ac­tions to the first at­tempts felt quite dis­cour­ag­ing.

A post that’s about “hey, I have an idea of a weird but po­ten­tially awe­some ac­tivity, here is an out­line, con­tact me if you are in­ter­ested”, is in the plan­ning stage. In the plan­ning stage it makes sense to have a lot more crit­i­cism and dis­cuss how the event should work.

Your com­ment is, I’m afraid, full of the most egre­gious straw­men—and what’s worse, they are straw­men which were trot­ted out, and sub­se­quently re­vealed for what they were (with their ac­cusers con­ced­ing the straw na­ture of their ac­cu­sa­tions), even at the time.

Any­one who wishes to see for them­selves can read the dis­cus­sion I linked (though if you do, please be sure to read not only ini­tial com­ments in ev­ery thread, but re­sponses, and counter-re­sponses… in short, do not just skim and as­sume you get the gist; ac­tu­ally take the time to un­der­stand what the dis­putants, on both sides, were say­ing). I have lit­tle to add now to what I said back then.

I will, how­ever, com­ment on this, which is an ex­am­ple of an un­for­tu­nately com­mon er­ror in rea­son­ing about this sort of situ­a­tion:

Now, the Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion is a perfectly nor­mal thing, and no one freaks out about it any­more.

It is only “a perfectly nor­mal thing” be­cause ev­ery­one who didn’t think it was perfectly nor­mal, has left! (Or, in the milder cases, sim­ply avoids such things, and even if this both­ers them, does not speak up, see­ing no point in re­hash­ing the same ar­gu­ment, know­ing that it will end in the same way: with their prefer­ences over­ruled.) It is a sim­ple case of evap­o­ra­tive cool­ing!

Seems im­por­tant to note that I en­dorse this com­ment. Ob­vi­ously I think it was cor­rect for Sols­tice to win the over­ton-win­dow fight (oth­er­wise I’d have made very differ­ent life choices). But it’s im­por­tant to be clear and hon­est about what hap­pened, and yes, there were some peo­ple who were quite un­happy with it, some of whom left, and some of whom re­mained, quietly an­noyed.

I do think it’s also im­por­tant to note that there are also peo­ple who were an­noyed or wor­ried ini­tially, went to Sols­tice, and af­ter a cou­ple years up­dated to “yeah this isn’t bad in the way I ini­tially thought it was.” (In both cases, the num­ber of peo­ple who “still don’t like it” and “have up­dated to ‘it’s fine’” that I have con­cretely ob­served are less than 10, so I’m hes­i­tant to make many gen­er­al­iza­tions)

I do think Villiam’s gen­eral claim of “if you pro­pose a new thing, es­pe­cially a new con­fus­ing thing, there’s a good chance you’ll get a dis­pro­por­tionate amount of vo­cal op­po­si­tion com­pared to sup­port” is true and note­wor­thy. (this isn’t quite how they framed it ini­tially and I’m not sure this is what they meant, but it is what I in­ter­preted them to mean, if I in­ter­preted wrong please cor­rect me)

Ob­vi­ously I think it was cor­rect for Sols­tice to win the over­ton-win­dow fight (oth­er­wise I’d have made very differ­ent life choices)

And, to be clear, I do not have any meta-ob­jec­tion to this (which is to say, my ob­ject-level opinion is the same as it ever was—I think this choice that ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­ni­ties col­lec­tively made was a poor one—but I have no prin­ci­pled ob­jec­tion to “we, as a com­mu­nity, de­cided to go a cer­tain way, and if some folks don’t care for that, that’s un­for­tu­nate, but this is what we’re do­ing”).

But, yes, pre­tend­ing that that’s not what hap­pened—pre­tend­ing that ac­tu­ally, the dis­sen­ters just turned out to be ob­vi­ously silly and their ob­jec­tions were ground­less and now they’ve quietly ac­cepted how wrong they were all along, now that their wrong­ness is plain for all to see—is not ac­cept­able at all.

I do think it’s also im­por­tant to note that there are also peo­ple who were an­noyed or wor­ried ini­tially, went to Sols­tice, and af­ter a cou­ple years up­dated to “yeah this isn’t bad in the way I ini­tially thought it was.”

In­deed. If I may ask—do you know of any peo­ple who ini­tially were in fa­vor /​ cau­tiously op­ti­mistic /​ am­biva­lent /​ etc., but later up­dated to “ac­tu­ally this is bad”?

In both cases, the num­ber of peo­ple who “still don’t like it” and “have up­dated to ‘it’s fine’” that I have con­cretely ob­served are less than 10, so I’m hes­i­tant to make many generalizations

I, too, have only a hand­ful of data points, so in­deed I don’t pro­pose to gen­er­al­ize, but I do want to note that you are rather less likely to ob­serve “still don’t like it” than you are to ob­serve “ac­tu­ally this is fine”, con­di­tional on the ex­is­tence of each, sim­ply be­cause you’re less likely to in­ter­act with peo­ple of the lat­ter per­sua­sion!

I have not heard any­one up­date start­ing from “this was okay” and then later “this was bad” di­rec­tion. (If any­one hap­pens to be read­ing along and had that ex­pe­rience this is as good a time as any to speak up)

(My rec­ol­lec­tion of your own ex­pe­rience, af­ter com­ing to a Sols­tice once, was that you said some­thing af­ter­wards like “okay, yeah that was still cringey but less cringey than I thought. I *am* wor­ried about the use of the Li­tany of Tarski.” [which is no longer part of Sols­tice].

It seems like as good a time as any to check if that mem­ory of mine is ac­cu­rate).

I re­mem­ber hav­ing that con­ver­sa­tion, but not the de­tails of what I said. Your ver­sion sounds plau­si­ble, based on my over­all rec­ol­lec­tion of the event.

(I sup­pose I should note, for any­one read­ing this, that the Sols­tice event I at­tended was one of the very early ones. It was held at a group house here in Brook­lyn, and done as part of a more gen­eral gath­er­ing; this was be­fore the Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion as such was made into a sep­a­rate event, with a rented event space, etc. That is the only Sols­tice cel­e­bra­tion I have at­tended, so I have no com­ment on what those that’ve been held since then are like.)

“if you pro­pose a new thing, es­pe­cially a new con­fus­ing thing, there’s a good chance you’ll get a dis­pro­por­tionate amount of vo­cal op­po­si­tion com­pared to sup­port” … if I in­ter­preted wrong please cor­rect me

Yes, this is how I meant it, but in con­text of Less Wrong es­pe­cially when the new thing is about ra­tio­nal­ist hav­ing some emo­tional ex­pe­rience and be­com­ing closer to each other. Even if it is an ob­vi­ously vol­un­tary ac­tivity no one is pres­sured to join. Unusual and con­fus­ing sug­ges­tions that would in­volve study­ing math or play­ing poker would not get that in­ten­sity of re­ac­tion.

(The sur­pris­ing part is why singing songs to­gether or liv­ing in the Dragon Army house is per­ceived as more dan­ger­ous than polyamory. But maybe be­cause the idea of polyamory came first, so the peo­ple who strongly ob­jected to that were already gone when the other ideas came.)

I do think Villiam’s gen­eral claim of “if you pro­pose a new thing, es­pe­cially a new con­fus­ing thing, there’s a good chance you’ll get a dis­pro­por­tionate amount of vo­cal op­po­si­tion com­pared to sup­port” is true and note­wor­thy.

It’s cer­tainly true, but is it re­ally note­wor­thy?

What I mean is: of course you’re go­ing to get more op­po­si­tion than sup­port when you pro­pose a con­fus­ing new thing. Not only is this ex­pected, but it is (it seems to me) cor­rect!

Change is bad. Any change must jus­tify it­self, must offer not merely some benefit (it­self an un­cer­tain out­come), but enough benefit to over­come the in­her­ent bad­ness of any change what­so­ever. And if the new thing is not just new, not just untested, but con­fus­ing? Why, that’s twice the bur­den of jus­tifi­ca­tion—at least!

Now, there are bad and ill-con­sid­ered ob­jec­tions to any­thing, even to the worst things. (“Let’s all jump off the Ver­raz­zano Bridge” is a poor idea, but if your ob­jec­tion to this plan is “But what if some­one laughs at me? I’d be mor­tified!”, you are be­ing ex­tremely fool­ish…) But while some of the ar­gu­ments against both the Sols­tice and Dragon Army were, in­deed, low-qual­ity ones, some of the most se­ri­ous ob­jec­tions stemmed from a (per­ceived) lack of ac­knowl­edg­ment of this bur­den of jus­tifi­ca­tion—a lack of sense that the plan’s au­thors were cog­nizant of the rea­sons why rea­son­able peo­ple might have reser­va­tions, at least, about go­ing for­ward.

It is all too easy to paint any­one who’s less than en­thu­si­as­tic about your plan as a re­flex­ive ob­jec­tor. Yet I find that the most vo­cal op­po­si­tion is of­ten aroused by ex­actly those plans which are made, and pre­sented, with the cer­tainty that no one could pos­si­bly ob­ject ex­cept for bad rea­sons.

Change is bad. Any change must jus­tify it­self, must offer not merely some benefit (it­self an un­cer­tain out­come), but enough benefit to over­come the in­her­ent bad­ness of any change what­so­ever.

If you ad­vo­cate that com­mon re­sources should be spent on X in­stead of Y that’s change that needs jus­tifi­ca­tion.

If you how­ever want to spend your own re­sources on cre­at­ing a new event, I don’t see why you should have to jus­tify your­self to other peo­ple be­yond what you need to do to en­courage them to come to your event. I would want peo­ple to start new events with­out feel­ing the need to jus­tify them­selves.

After the event is over it’s much eas­ier to see what worked and what didn’t. Ex­per­i­ment­ing with differ­ent events is valuable.

I am not say­ing: “change, usu­ally, is bad”, or “it is a good de­fault as­sump­tion that a change is bad”, or “change tends to be bad”, or “more of­ten than not, change is bad”, or any­thing at all similar.

I am say­ing: change, in­her­ently, is bad. Change is bad merely by virtue of be­ing change. What­ever the ac­tual change is, nev­er­the­less the fact of some­thing chang­ing in any way is, it­self, di­rectly, bad.

Now, we have all heard this: “ev­ery im­prove­ment is, nec­es­sar­ily, a change”—quite so. And of course it is pos­si­ble for a change to be good on net, which is what we usu­ally call an “im­prove­ment”. Nev­er­the­less the ques­tion of whether a change is good, on net, must be an­swered by tak­ing the spe­cific pos­i­tive benefit of the spe­cific change in ques­tion, and sub­tract­ing, not only any­thing that got worse, but also the in­her­ent bad­ness of chang­ing some­thing! You “start with a nega­tive score”, so to speak. Thus it is pos­si­ble to have a change that has a pos­i­tive benefit, makes noth­ing worse, and yet the benefit is small, and does not suffice to over­come that “start­ing score”; in such a case we might say “yes, if we are choos­ing be­tween A and B from a neu­tral start­ing point, B is a lit­tle bet­ter; but not so much that it’s worth­while to change to B, if already at A”.

What is it then? You beg the ques­tion again by as­sum­ing it while try­ing to show how its not an as­sump­tion.

not only any­thing that got worse, but also the in­her­ent bad­ness of chang­ing some­thing! You “start with a nega­tive score”,

This isn’t an ar­gu­ment, it’s just restat­ing the premise. To see this, just change all in­stances of “change is bad” to “change is good” in your ar­gu­ment, and no­tice how they en­tire thing is still co­her­ent. You start with a pos­i­tive score for the change, be­cause of the in­her­ent good­ness of change, and so on...

In­deed, it’s not an ar­gu­ment—any more than my origi­nal com­ment was an as­sump­tion!

To see this, just change all in­stances of “change is bad” to “change is good” in your ar­gu­ment, and no­tice how they en­tire thing is still co­her­ent. You start with a pos­i­tive score for the change, be­cause of the in­her­ent good­ness of change, and so on...

Of course it’s still co­her­ent. Why wouldn’t it be?

You keep call­ing what I wrote an ar­gu­ment, as if I am try­ing to prove a state­ment of fact. But isn’t it ob­vi­ous that what I’m talk­ing about is a mat­ter of judg­ment, of value? And the nega­tion of a state­ment of value is just as co­her­ent as the origi­nal…

I don’t know how a per­sonal value judge­ment fits in with your talk about a “bur­den of jus­tifi­ca­tion.” Why should some­one feel the need to jus­tify against your per­sonal value judge­ment that change is bad? They sim­ply have a differ­ent value judge­ment than you.

Why should some­one feel the need to jus­tify against your per­sonal value judge­ment that change is bad?

Cer­tainly they should not—un­less, of course, that value judg­ment is not idiosyn­cratic, but com­mon, or near-uni­ver­sal. It seems to me that this is so. You may dis­agree. In any case, jus­tifi­ca­tion is needed to the ex­tent that said value judg­ment is shared by those af­fected by, or those eval­u­at­ing, any change.

That makes sense. I think I was tripped up by your use of the words “is” and “bad”, both of which are am­bigu­ous. Things that might have helped me get your mean­ing are swap­ping “is” for “feels”, swap­ping “bad” for “aver­sive” or “un­pleas­ant”, and adding the qual­ifier “for me” or “for many peo­ple”.

Of course, if you were un­der the im­pres­sion that this is a near uni­ver­sal aver­sion, it makes less sense to make any of those changes. I sus­pect that that as­sump­tion also un­der­lies the mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion of why peo­ple didn’t ad­dress the “change is aver­sive” ob­jec­tion in the origi­nal post as well—they typ­i­cal-mind fal­la­cied that change was neu­tral or good, and you did the re­verse.

Look­ing at the dis­cus­sion you linked… I ad­mit I can­not find the hor­rible ex­am­ples my mind keeps tel­ling me I have seen. So, maybe I was wrong. Or maybe it was a differ­ent ar­ti­cle, dunno. A few nega­tive com­ments were deleted; but those were all writ­ten by the same per­son, so in ei­ther case they do not rep­re­sent a mass re­ac­tion. The re­main­ing com­ment clos­est to what I wanted to say is this one...

The whole point of rit­u­als like this in re­li­gion is to switch off think­ing and get peo­ple go­ing with the flow. The epistemic dan­ger should be pretty ob­vi­ous. Ri­tual = ir­ra­tional. [1]

...but even that one is not too bad.

It is only “a perfectly nor­mal thing” be­cause ev­ery­one who didn’t think it was perfectly nor­mal, has left! … It is a sim­ple case of evap­o­ra­tive cool­ing!

This is a good point. What­ever the com­mu­nity does, if it causes the op­pos­ing peo­ple to leave, will be in hind­sight seen as the ob­vi­ously right thing to do (be­cause those who dis­agree have already left), even if in a par­allel Everett branch do­ing the op­po­site thing is seen as the ob­vi­ously right thing.

I still feel weird about peo­ple who would leave a com­mu­nity just be­cause a few mem­bers of the com­mu­nity did sing a song to­gether. Also, peo­ple keep leav­ing for all kinds of rea­sons. I am pretty sure some have left be­cause of lack of emo­tional con­nec­tion, such as, uhm, do­ing things to­gether.

Meta:

Okay, at this mo­ment I feel quite con­fused about this com­ment I just wrote. Like, from cer­tain per­spec­tives it seems like you are right, and I am sim­ply re­fus­ing to say “oops”. At the very least, I failed to find a suffi­ciently hor­rible anti-Sols­tice com­ment.

Yet, some­how, it is you say­ing that there were peo­ple who left the ra­tio­nal­ity move­ment be­cause of the Sols­tice rit­ual, which is the kind of hys­ter­i­cal re­ac­tion I tried to point at. (I can’t imag­ine my­self leav­ing a move­ment just be­cause a few of its mem­bers de­cided to meet and sing a song to­gether.)

Yet, some­how, it is you say­ing that there were peo­ple who left the ra­tio­nal­ity move­ment be­cause of the Sols­tice rit­ual, which is the kind of hys­ter­i­cal re­ac­tion I tried to point at. (I can’t imag­ine my­self leav­ing a move­ment just be­cause a few of its mem­bers de­cided to meet and sing a song to­gether.)

I don’t think it’s re­ally “a few peo­ple singing songs to­gether”. It’s more like...an over­all shift in de­mo­graph­ics, tone, and norms. If I had to put it suc­cinctly, the old school LessWrong was for se­ri­ous STEM nerds and hard sci­ence fic­tion dorks. It was su­per su­per deep into the whole Shock Level meme­plex thing. Over time it’s be­come a much softer sort of fan­dom geek thing. Ra­tion­al­ist Tum­blr and SlateS­tarCodex aren’t marginal colonies, they’re the cen­ter driv­ing force be­hind what’s left of the origi­nal ‘LessWrong ra­tio­nal­ity move­ment’. Nat­u­rally, a lot of those old guard mem­bers find this ab­hor­rent and have no plans to ever par­ti­ci­pate in it.

I agree with Rae­mon that it is un­likely to be pro­duc­tive or ap­pro­pri­ate to re­hash this ar­gu­ment in the cur­rent thread. How­ever, I do have things to say on the mat­ter (in re­sponse to this com­ment of yours in par­tic­u­lar), so it may be worth­while to start an­other post, or a thread on the lat­est Open Thread post, on this topic; or you may feel free to ask for my thoughts on the mat­ter via pri­vate mes­sage.

Note: while this thread is sort of rele­vant, and I think there are some pro­duc­tive ways for it to con­tinue, I think there are many more un­pro­duc­tive ways to con­tinue than pro­duc­tive ones.

As thread-owner, I’d say: “Feel free to con­tinue this here if you have a spe­cific con­fu­sion that needs re­solv­ing, that seems re­solv­able, or an out­come that you think is ac­tu­ally achiev­able to achieve. But don’t just re­hash a 8-year-old-ar­gu­ment with­out re­flect­ing on your life choices and hav­ing some kind of goal. Err on the side of dis­en­gag­ing if you’re not sure if you have a goal.”

Some al­ter­nate frames on all this, to help hedge against the “did Ray just an­chor the whole dis­cus­sion with the wrong frame?” pos­si­bil­ity.

Pro­fes­sional /​ Non-Community

Epistemic pro­fes­sional peers

I was re­cently read­ing “How to Mea­sure Any­thing”, a book which AFAICT pre­dates and is un­en­tan­gled with LessWrong. HTMA is very straight­for­ward and pro­fes­sional/​aca­demic – here are a se­ries of tools for how to em­ploy bayesian episte­mol­ogy on real world pro­jects with high stakes and murky ter­ri­tory.

The book gave me glimpse of an al­ter­nate world that could be (and per­haps is?) where there’s not much ori­ented around “com­mu­nity”, ex­cept in­so­far as most aca­demic and pro­fes­sional dis­ci­plines have com­mu­ni­ties.

Pro­fes­sional Effec­tive Altruism

The rea­son “pro­fes­sional bayesi­anism” doesn’t feel suffi­cient to me is that it doesn’t ac­tu­ally make sure the hard prob­lems in the world get ad­dressed. It ac­tu­ally re­quires not merely in­tel­lec­tual tools but a com­pre­hen­sive wor­ld­view, deep mod­els and goal-driven net­work to ac­com­plish them.

On one hand, this doesn’t need to be any more “com­mu­nity” like than work­ing at Google (or per­haps a level up, Alpha­bet). On the other hand, Google seems to in­vest huge amounts of effort into mak­ing sure they have a good in­ter­nal com­mu­nity.

In both lenses, in­di­vi­d­ual or­ga­ni­za­tions may make an effort to meet peo­ple’s needs, but it prob­a­bly won’t do the “some­one brings you soup if you’re sick” thing.

The University

When chat­ting with Habryka, his al­ter­nate frame was more like an ideal­ized uni­ver­sity. There are very clear gate­keep­ing mechanisms for get­ting in (per­haps you pay money, per­haps you have to ap­ply and meet some bar). Once in, you’re there to study for a few years. There are many branch­ing path­ways of things to learn, and then there are many op­por­tu­ni­ties to self-or­ga­nize into clubs, fra­ter­ni­ties, etc.

There’s an ex­pec­ta­tion that even­tu­ally you move on to some pro­fes­sional or­ga­ni­za­tion, or pos­si­bly mov­ing into some­thing like academia where you just figure things out with­out a di­rect profit goal.

In Habryka’s frame, as I un­der­stand it (yo habryka feel free to write a ver­sion of this that ar­tic­u­lates it bet­ter. :P), the Univer­sity is Mis­sion-Aligned. The offi­cial cur­ricu­lum is of the form “study the par­tic­u­lar dis­ci­plines you need to make se­ri­ous progress on the Mis­sion”. There are var­i­ous clubs that range from Mis­sion-ad­jae­cent (like Model UN) or ran­dom the­ater /​ craft /​ cul­tural clubs.

The Church and the Bul­letin Board

Another sub­tly al­ter­nate frame from Village is Church.

“Village” vaguely im­plies that the pri­mary con­nec­tion is ge­o­graphic and eco­nomic. To some ex­tent, peo­ple trust each other be­cause if peo­ple aren’t liter­ally plow­ing fields and black­smithing and what-not, the village starves in the win­ter.

“Church” is some­thing that can con­tinues to suc­ceed even in a large town or city where peo­ple come and go more eas­ily (al­though I’m not con­fi­dent this is a sta­ble ar­range­ment – once you have large cities, atomic in­di­vi­d­u­al­ism and the grad­ual ero­sion of Church might be in­evitable)

To be a mem­ber of a church, you are ex­pected to tithe, and to show up at mass ev­ery Sun­day. You listen to ser­mons that es­tab­lish com­mon knowl­edge of what your peo­ple do-and-don’t-do. You re­cite words that most likely have some af­fect on your psy­chol­ogy even if you don’t liter­ally be­lieve them.

The church is de­signed to scale – large num­bers of peo­ple in pews fac­ing a sin­gle priest. (There are al­ter­nate ar­range­ments like pa­gan cir­cles that don’t scale as well that re­quire higher skill on the part of par­ti­ci­pants). A crowd of peo­ple, many of whom haven’t met, can par­ti­ci­pate, with­out new­bies mess­ing any­thing up.

Dur­ing church, peo­ple who are go­ing through hard times, or who have passed par­tic­u­lar mile­stones, are men­tioned and prayed for.

Once you get in­side the church, there is a bul­letin board, that in­cludes a bunch of ac­tivi­ties like soup kitchen vol­un­teer, bible study, choir prac­tice, and maybe less rele­vant things like bingo night. Many of these provide sub-com­mu­ni­ties that are easy to get in­volved but re­quire real work and com­mit­ment to ex­cel at.

If you are sick, or re­cently had a funeral, some­one liter­ally brings you soup.

There is a nat­u­ral “min­i­mum mem­ber­ship” (wherein you get soup if you’re sick, but aren’t nec­es­sar­ily high sta­tus), and the cost for that is 10% of your in­come and a whole lot of time. I’m guess­ing (but am not con­fi­dent, I’ve never been to church for an ex­tended pe­riod) that there is ad­di­tional be­long­ing/​so­cial-sup­port/​power that you get if you prove your­self a use­ful and/​or fun mem­ber of the com­mu­nity.

I would like to have a com­mu­nity that strives to be ra­tio­nal also “out­side the lab”. The words “pro­fes­sional bayesi­anism” feel like bayesi­anism within the lab. (I haven’t read the book, so per­haps I am mis­in­ter­pret­ing the au­thor’s in­tent.)

Google seems to in­vest huge amounts of effort into mak­ing sure they have a good in­ter­nal com­mu­nity.

That’s nice, but ul­ti­mately, if there is a ten­sion be­tween “what is bet­ter for you” and “what is bet­ter for Google”, Google will prob­a­bly choose the lat­ter. What could pos­si­bly be good for you but bad for Google? Think­ing for less than one minute I’d say: be­com­ing fi­nan­cially in­de­pen­dent, so you no longer have to work; build­ing your own startup; find­ing a spouse, hav­ing kids, and re­fus­ing to work over­time...

Yeah, this is a fully gen­eral ar­gu­ment against any so­ciety, but it seems to me that a Village, sim­ply by not be­ing profit ori­ented, would have greater free­dom to op­ti­mize for the benefit of its mem­bers. For a busi­ness com­pany, ev­ery em­ployer is a cost. In a village, well-be­hav­ing cit­i­zens pay their own bills, and provide some value to each other, whether that value is greater or smaller, it is still pos­i­tive or zero.

“Church” is some­thing that can con­tinues to suc­ceed even in a large town or city where peo­ple come and go more eas­ily (al­though I’m not con­fi­dent this is a sta­ble ar­range­ment – once you have large cities, atomic in­di­vi­d­u­al­ism and the grad­ual ero­sion of Church might be in­evitable)

An im­por­tant part of be­ing in the Church is be­ing phys­i­cally pre­sent at its re­li­gious ac­tivi­ties, e.g. ev­ery Sun­day morn­ing. So even if you hap­pen to be sur­rounded mostly by non-be­liev­ers in your city, at least once in a week you be­come phys­i­cally sur­rounded by be­liev­ers. (A tem­po­rary Village.) Phys­i­cal prox­im­ity cre­ates the kind of emo­tions that in­ter­net can­not sub­sti­tute.

Church is an “eu­kary­otic” or­ga­ni­za­tion: it has a bound­ary on the out­side (be­liev­ers vs non-be­liev­ers), but also in­side (clergy vs lay mem­bers). This slows down value shift: you can ac­cept many be­liev­ers, while only wor­ry­ing about value al­ign­ment of the clergy: po­ten­tial hereti­cal opinions of the lay mem­bers are just their per­sonal opinions, not the offi­cial teach­ing; if nec­es­sary, the clergy will make this clear in a co­or­di­nated way. Hav­ing stronger filter in the in­ner bound­ary al­lows you to have weaker filter on the outer bound­ary, be­cause there is no democ­racy in the outer cir­cle.

Trans­lated to the lan­guage of the ar­ti­cle: Mis­sion can have mul­ti­ple Villages, but Village can only have one Mis­sion. As an ex­am­ple, if med­i­ta­tion be­comes pop­u­lar among some ra­tio­nal­ists, and they start go­ing to Bud­dhist re­treats and hang­ing out with Bud­dhist, and then they bring their nerdy Bud­dhist friends to ra­tio­nal­ity mee­tups… it should be clear that the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity is in ab­solutely no risk of be­com­ing a re­li­gious com­mu­nity, be­cause the mys­te­ri­ous bul­lshit of Bud­dhism will be re­jected (at least by the in­ner cir­cle) just like the mys­te­ri­ous bul­lshit of any other re­li­gion. Similarly when peo­ple will try to con­quer the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity for their poli­ti­cal fac­tion; but I be­lieve we are do­ing quite well here.

You listen to ser­mons that es­tab­lish com­mon knowl­edge of what your peo­ple do-and-don’t-do.

The im­por­tant thing here is that the ser­mons come from the top. They do not rep­re­sent the lat­est fash­ion­able con­trar­ian opinion. The Church pro­vides many things for its mem­bers, but free­dom to give ser­mons is not one of them.

(To avoid mi­s­un­der­stand­ing: I am not prais­ing dic­ta­tor­ship for the dic­ta­tor­ship’s sake here. Rather, it is my ex­pe­rience from var­i­ous pro­jects, that there is a type of peo­ple who come to in­tro­duce con­tro­versy, but don’t con­tribute to the core mis­sion. Th­ese peo­ple will cause drama, and provide noth­ing use­ful in re­turn. If they win, they will only keep push­ing fur­ther; if they lose, they will rage­quit and maybe spend some time slan­der­ing you. It is nice to have a mechanism that stops them at the door. Even more im­por­tantly in a group that at­tracts so many con­trar­i­ans, and where “hey, you call your­selves ‘ra­tio­nal­ists’, but you ir­ra­tionally re­fuse my opinion be­fore you spent thou­sand hours de­bat­ing it thor­oughly?!” is a pow­er­ful ar­gu­ment. The ser­mons are a tool of co­or­di­na­tion, and co­or­di­na­tion is hard.)

agree with a lot of this, esp the part about not try­ing to wel­come ev­ery­one /​ lower bar­rier to en­try to the point that there’s no com­mit­ment in­volved

i think a suc­cess­ful village will re­quire a fair amount of com­mit­ment and sac­ri­fice, in terms of time, effort, op­por­tu­nity cost, and prob­a­bly money

if ev­ery­one is look­ing to max­i­mize their own in­ter­ests, while pur­su­ing a village, i think this will drain re­sources to the point that noth­ing gets done or things fall apart. a weak struc­ture will beget a frag­ile village. and i think a frag­ile village can eas­ily be net harm­ful.

at the same time, it’s good to be con­sid­er­ate to peo­ple who can’t con­tribute a whole lot due to dis­abil­ity or fi­nan­cial in­se­cu­rity.

1. How do you think about San Fran­cisco /​ Oak­land /​ other parts of the bay area, as they re­late the Berkeley com­mu­nity? Per­son­ally, I wish there were more cen­ters of com­mu­nity in SF. Both ar­eas are near enough to each other that I think it’s pos­si­ble to make a village that con­tains peo­ple in the ad­ja­cent towns, but the com­mute and net­work dy­nam­ics makes this a bit tricky. I haven’t figured out an ideal vi­sion for this, but I have the sense that there are op­por­tu­ni­ties here (in SF and other parts of the bay area) that haven’t been ex­plored.

II. Com­mu­nity based re­li­gions have churches in many places. I grew up Seventh Day Ad­ven­tist, and there were Ad­ven­tist churches in most states and many coun­tries. When­ever a Seventh Day Ad­ven­tist moves, they find their near­est church and start at­tend­ing. I won­der if it would be pos­si­ble /​ de­sir­able to cul­ti­vate this type of net­work of com­mu­ni­ties. There already ex­ists some of this be­tween Seat­tle, the bay, New York, Bos­ton, and el­se­where, but I think it could be in­ten­tion­ally cul­ti­vated.

Mis­sion re­quires peo­ple in differ­ent places. Oxford, the bay area, and DC are three places where there are cluster of longterm-fu­ture-Mis­sion ori­ented peo­ple, who all be­lieve they need to be in those places in or­der to be able to work on their mis­sion effec­tively.

Berkeley hap­pens to be par­tic­u­larly village shaped, wherein hous­ing is (rel­a­tively) af­ford­able such that ac­tu­ally 100 peo­ple can live in walk­ing dis­tance to each other… and they do.

(Note: while I ad­mit­tedly will prob­a­bly not stick to this us­age, part of the rea­son I coined ‘The Village’ for Berkeley in par­tic­u­lar is be­cause it’s liter­ally Village sized and village shaped, whereas other com­mu­ni­ties felt more like ‘com­mu­ni­ties.’)

I hon­estly think peo­ple in Oak­land-in-par­tic­u­lar should prob­a­bly move to Berkeley – it makes more sense to con­cen­trate the village than di­ver­sify there (un­less they are speci­fi­cally part of the Lev­er­age Cluster in which they should move to Lake Mer­ritt if they haven’t already).

I definitely think there the SF com­mu­nity(ies) should con­tinue to strengthen it­self/​them­selves. (the meetup that Maia and Roger run seems to be go­ing strong. I know of a cou­ple good group houses). San Fran­cisco seems to suffer a bit from “there’s not an ob­vi­ous place to cluster such that pub­lic trans­porta­tion isn’t a prob­lem, and things are ex­pen­sive which is quite limit­ing.” I don’t know enough about it to know what’s strate­gi­cally ad­viseable but if it’s pos­si­ble to co­or­di­nate bet­ter there I think peo­ple should.

Lo­cal Chapters

I think we already have some­thing like “if you’re a ra­tio­nal­ist mov­ing to a new city you should look for the lo­cal ra­tio­nal­ist meetup”, and that that makes sense as a model. There are some deeper prob­lems that in­volve pres­sure to move to­wards ma­jor hubs once you get suffi­ciently agenty and mis­sion-al­igned, which I think need to be more thor­oughly re­solved.

Other Hubs

I know very lit­tle about other hubs – my sense is that only Berkeley ended up par­tic­u­larly “village-like” – Oxford and DC seem (from my van­tage point) more like ei­ther a pro­fes­sional net­work (for Mis­sion stuff) or a lo­cal club (for com­mu­nity-qua-com­mu­nity stuff). It’s not ob­vi­ous a pri­ori that any­one else should be as­piring to be a “true village” – only that since Berkeley has already ori­ented in that di­rec­tion, it should con­tinue to con­soli­date it’s efforts and try harder.

My ex­pe­rience in Seat­tle was 2x − 3x more Village-like than my ex­pe­rience in Berkeley. Caveat that I also didn’t live in Berkeley, first I lived in Oak­land near Lev­er­age and now I live in San Fran­cisco.

Seat­tle’s com­mu­nity is small enough to have one pri­mary group house where par­ties hap­pen and peo­ple con­gre­gate, so it re­ally felt like one ex­tended so­cial group, whereas in Berkeley it feels like there are many. Some peo­ple in Seat­tle also feel very proud of their com­mu­nity (my­self in­cluded, even though I’ve moved here), which to me sug­gests a village-ness. I get the sense that in Seat­tle the fo­cus is more the Village than the Mis­sion, which then has the prob­lem you men­tioned of agenty mis­sion-ori­ented peo­ple mov­ing to other places.

I do think Seat­tle, like Berkeley, should as­pire to be a “true village”, since many peo­ple there de­sire this, and the benefits are large. I also think hav­ing mul­ti­ple suc­cess­ful villages would strengthen the [global] com­mu­nity over­all. I think Seat­tle has the ad­van­tage that it is small and cen­tral­ized, and Berkeley has the ad­van­tage that it has more Mis­sion en­ergy.

Ray, let’s com­pare notes about group houses in SF offline. I know of a cou­ple but not many, and I’d be in­ter­ested to know of more. (And I pre­fer to talk about peo­ple’s homes in a less pub­lic fo­rum).

I’m notic­ing an er­ror I’ve been mak­ing, which is to be sort of fatal­is­tic about com­mu­nity in SF rather than gath­er­ing data and mak­ing plans.

Nod. (FYI I’m not sure I have much to say about SF be­cause I don’t live there and don’t know much about the con­straints it’s un­der, but I’m happy to chat about it and help brain­storm ideas or con­sid­er­a­tions)

On a re­lated, but some­what differ­ent is­sue: I feel that there has been some­thing of an un­der-in­vest­ment in ra­tio­nal­ity com­mu­nity build­ing over­all. EA has CEA, but ra­tio­nal­ity doesn’t have an equiv­a­lent (CFAR doesn’t play the same com­mu­nity build­ing role). There isn’t any or­gani­sa­tion re­spon­si­ble for grow­ing the com­mu­nity, or­ganis­ing con­fer­ences and ad­dress­ing challenges that ar­rive.

That said, I’m not sure that there is nec­es­sar­ily agree­ment that there is a sin­gle mis­sion. Some peo­ple are in ra­tio­nal­ity for ai, some in­sight porn, some for the per­sonal de­vel­op­ment and some sim­ply for so­cial rea­sons. Even though EA has a mas­sively broad goal, do­ing the most good seems to suffice to spur ac­tion in a way that ra­tio­nal­ity hasn’t.

I de­liber­ately defined the Mis­sion fairly broadly – I think there’s a sense in which any­one who’s com­mit­ted to mak­ing a dent in the uni­verse, who is also ded­i­cated to think­ing clearly about it, while sub­scribing to rea­son­able co­op­er­a­tion norms, is (or could be) on the same team.

(As noted el­sethread, my cur­rent best guess it that the village should fo­cus on truth­seek­ing, and the mis­sion is ba­si­cally truth­seek­ing + im­pact, with an ab­strac­tion one-level higher than Effec­tive Altru­ism. i.e. the mis­sion in­cludes EA, and in­cludes at least some other things, but I’m less con­fi­dent I can clearly ar­tic­u­late what they should be)

I like your defi­ni­tion of the mis­sion—I haven’t heard it de­scribed in that way /​ that de­gree of de­tail be­fore, and I tend to agree with it. I’m not sure how uni­ver­sally agreed it is, but I would cer­tainly ad­vo­cate for your vi­sion of it.

Let’s say a bunch of friends hang around a beach on the week­ends. There isn’t food there and they wish there were. It’s re­ally easy to be­come the per­son who brings a cooler of good­ies and some veg­gie hot dogs to grill.

The Berkeley com­mu­nity is like a beach that already has a re­ally good taco truck. Sure, maybe it’d be nice if there was an­other food truck down the beach a ways, or with a differ­ent type of food, but food isn’t re­ally NEEDED in the same way. The low hang­ing fruit is taken. It’s harder to es­tab­lish a brand new thing when there’s a pre-ex­ist­ing thing. And maybe the per­son run­ning the taco truck would like to step down, but it’s a lot big­ger ask to hand off run­ning a fully li­censed taco truck, than bring­ing some good­ies in a cooler.

I have very pre­limi­nary thoughts, but as noted, it’s a fairly fraught is­sue. I’ll want to write about it at some point, hope­fully soon (but can’t promise that). Down­side risk is high enough that I want to make sure to do a good job with it.